How Google Search Really Works

Updated February 28, 2025

And Its SEO Implications

Understanding how Google search works is key to understanding and applying SEO, especially White Hat SEO, techniques.  As part of their “Power Searching” series, Matt Cutts brilliantly and simply explains how search engines actually work.

One misconception is the Google search algorithm searches the web. In actuality, the search engine combs through the billions of pages they’ve indexed. OK, what’s the big difference? If a page hasn’t been crawled by Google’s spiders, then it’s invisible and can’t be served up during a search.

Matt further explains that when the algorithm indexes your content, 200 or so questions are asked. Questions like:

• How many times does this page contain your key words?
• Do the words appear in the title? In the URL (web address)?
• Do the words appear directly adjacent?
• Does the page include synonyms for those words?
• Is this page from a quality website? Or is it low quality, even spammy?
• What is this page’s PageRank? That’s a formula invented by Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It rates a web page’s importance by looking at how many outside (aka inbound) links point to it. It also looks at how important those links are.

Google Search & SEO

If you’ve been reading this blog awhile, then you’ve probably heard about our White Hat SEO philosophy. In a nutshell, we use techniques that follow the spirit of search rather than manipulative tactics to serve up content that a searcher really doesn’t want.  Spammers are notorious for this practice.

So what does playing by the rules mean?

• Be strategic with keywords. Used once on a page, is simply a word on a page. Used twice is a mention. Mentioned three times, then it’s a keyword. There’s a delicate balance; overuse can alienate your human audience.
• Meta descriptions, url titles and other geeky stuff matters to be effective in SEO.
• SEO link management doesn’t mean buying links. You want to strategically manage who links to your content. For example sites with a .edu in their url can be link gold.
• Commitment to generating content  so you’re consistently posting relevant material.  Google gives you ranking points for recency and relevancy. No content = search invisibility.

Google Search is ever evolving and probably why I find it so fascinating and challenging.  What search challenges are you tackling?