How Does Google Find and Rank Content?

I find the best way to explain how search engines rank content is using the library metaphor. After all, Google is just a giant library. Let's pretend for a moment you work in a library. You have a ton of books in a pile in front of you, and you need to figure out where in the library these books need to be stored. This is a great way to think about how Google finds, analyzes, and ranks content. Your first step is to find all of these books. This is crawling. If a book isn't in the stack to begin with or you can't see it, you won't be able to put it on a shelf. That's the discovery stage in the sense of a website. Do you have a piece of content and can the search engines access it? The second step is to categorize the books. This is indexing. The books in your library cover all sorts of topics. Fiction, nonfiction, science, history, and technology. How do you sort them? This is where you assess the relevance of a book to a topic by looking at the title, flipping through some pages, seeing who the author is, and whether they're known for writing around certain topics. Search engine bots index content on a website in a similar way. They crawl the content and say, what are the contents of this web page? What do they mean? Then they bucket them into some sort of topic and start to create some semantic associations between them. Your third step is figuring out which books to feature? What should go on your bestseller shelf? Which books should you make easier to find than others? This is ranking. The way you determine which books are most easily discoverable for visitors to your library is mostly based on whether the book comes from credible sources.