Search Engine Algorithms: Must Know Before SEO

First off, many people do not know what a search engine algorithm is.  Another mistake is thinking Google has just one algorithm when it is actually many.  Each algorithm has a specific task to perform. An algorithm is basically a program that is made to filter data and provide or changes based on the results.

How do search engines collect information on websites?

Search engines and Google collect information on every website using little programs called bots, crawlers, or spiders. These little programs have visited virtually every website on the Internet to collect information on every one of them. These little programs collect keywords, phrases, links, and other coding located on every website. It then stores this information in huge databases used by the search engines to apply filters called algorithms. A virtual copy of almost every publicly available website worldwide can be found in these search engine databases.

Let's Make it easy

To make it easy to understand, imagine that you have a list in an Excel document and it contained 5,000 names and you only wanted to know the names in the list that had the last name of Smith.  You could write a small program that found only the name Smith and displayed those entries with only that name.  That is a basic algorithm.   Now Google's algorithms are much more complex and the amount of data it has to filter is almost unimaginable but each algorithm Google runs has a specific task and changes displayed results differently.   

In 2016, Google used many new algorithm changes to shake things up.  Each algorithm has a specific purpose or filter.   Let’s take a look at some of the Google Algorithms in recent history that really shook things up.  Let’s take a look at these major algorithms in the next few sections.

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