The index of a search engine refers to the system that allows it to store the pages of each website that its robots browse in order to have a copy of the web at a given time. When an Internet user launches a search, it is from the resources found in the index that a results page is generated.
Definition of Index
One of the most important elements within Google's infrastructure is its index. It is one of the resources on which the display of the results pages depends directly.
What is the Search Engine Index?
In computer science, an index is a database organized according to a particular structure and which allows a data management system to quickly find specific files or documents in a timely manner.
It's exactly the same in the world of SEO. The search engine index refers to a directory of web pages stored on servers at a given time. It is from this directory that the results are drawn when an Internet user launches a request by typing keywords in the search field.
All major search engines without exception (Yahoo!, Bing, Google) have an index in which a copy of the web is stored. That of Google is the largest with several hundred billion individual pages and a size exceeding 100 million Gigabytes.
What is the Index used for?
To illustrate what an index is used for, let's take the example of a large library where the works are cataloged and arranged by subject, author and title. With such an organization (indexing), finding a book whose references are known will be easy and fast. All you have to do is go to the right department to identify the document you are looking for.
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The principle is the same for the Google index. It allows the robots responsible for generating the results pages in response to Internet users' requests to quickly find useful and relevant information about a request or a key expression. Without this copy of the web, the search time on the platform would be significantly longer.
In addition, the existence of an index with up-to-date data allows the search engine to avoid constantly wasting resources to find out what each web page contains. The work is done in advance for each crawled document, which streamlines the process.
Google's index also allows it to quickly identify new information that has been added to a site's content and integrate it automatically. To do this, all the search engine robots need to do is to compare the version of the site that is stored in the index with the one that is actually available online.
How does the Search Engine Index work?
The indexing process that allows search engines to add web pages to their database involves three steps:
- Crawl of web pages across the internet
- Copying the contents of the sites explored
- Storing information on servers
Crawling robots
The crawl refers to the phase during which the web is explored by an indexing robot. When the latter arrives on a page, it follows all the links that are there in order to discover as and when new resources to index . It is Googlebot who takes care of this mission for Google. It constantly browses web pages on the web and periodically returns to already indexed sites to explore them again.
This mechanism takes place within the limit of the crawl budget (maximum number of web pages that can be explored) of each website. The crawl budget is determined by the Google robot according to a certain number of criteria: performance of the server hosting the site, depth of its tree structure, update frequency, etc. In order not to waste your crawl budget, it is advised to avoid certain practices such as duplicate content. This advice is mainly aimed at managers of e-commerce sites.
Note that Googlebot is not a single robot, but a set of bots dedicated to exploring websites and analyzing their content. They are also called crawlers or spiders. Thanks to its many indexing robots, Google has a crawl power estimated at several tens of billions of URLs per day .
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Copy of contents
As Google bots follow links on web pages, they perform automatic copy work. They grab the HTML code for each page and pass it to the search engine . This code contains all the elements that Google's processing system needs to categorize the content of each indexed document and understand its meaning.
Storage of content on servers
All the data retrieved by Google's spiders is stored on millions of servers distributed in more than twenty datacenters located in America, Europe and Asia: Mountain View (California), Dublin (Ireland), Beijing (China) … These servers are permanently active and operate in a coordinated fashion.
Note: the search engine index represents only part of the web. Many pages that are not indexable or simply inaccessible to crawlers do not appear there! These are the famous deep web and dark web networks.
Google Indexes
Since 2003, Google has used 2 indexes to store the content of sites that have been crawled by its robots. One of them is a primary index and the other is secondary.
L'index principal
It is in the main index of Google that the most qualitative web pages are found. When a user launches a query, the search results are systematically drawn from this premium Google database.
The secondary index
This Google index contains web pages whose content quality is not very good. This is where the pages with duplicate content and those that the engine considers to be second best are found. Although indexed, these web pages do not always appear after a Google search. To display them, users must first press “Search again to include omitted results” at the bottom of the SERP.
It is therefore in your best interest to avoid finding yourself in this secondary index if your wish is to optimize the natural referencing of your website to have visibility on Google. The content you offer on the pages of your site must be original and of high quality.
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The 2010 refresh
In order to best adapt to the evolution of the web, Google launched in 2010 Caffeine, a project to renew its indexing system. This major update had several effects on the search engine's index and its operation. First, it greatly increased the indexing capacities of the platform's robots. The number of web pages that could be indexed every second grew.
Second, the way Google's index web pages are treated has changed from a layered system to a more elaborate process whereby each page is treated individually. This definitely improved the freshness of the results. Now, when Google indexes content, it can immediately appear in the SERP if deemed relevant to a query.
In addition, for a few years now, Google has implemented the mobile-first index, which is a new way of crawling web pages. Mobile -first indexing notably gives priority to the mobile version of websites rather than their desktop version. It aims to offer the best possible browsing experience to Internet users who are increasingly oriented towards mobile research.
Google index: how to index your website?
To appear in Google's SERP, your website must be present in its index. Here are some actions you can take to speed up the process of getting your content indexed by Googlebot.
Force indexing via Google Search Console
It is possible to force the indexing of a website via the Google Search Console, formerly Google webmaster tools. To do this, simply create an XLM-type sitemap and send it to the search engine via the tool's interface: Index > Sitemaps . Typically, indexing starts within 24 hours of submitting the sitemap to Google Search Console. However, nothing is guaranteed.
Integrate backlinks from authority sites
The easiest and most convenient way to get your website indexed by Google is to get backlinks (inbound links) from high PageRank sites. Since these domains are usually crawled on a regular basis, the likelihood of search engine crawlers quickly discovering your website is high. In addition, having quality incoming links is positive for your natural referencing, because it is a guarantee of credibility in the eyes of Google.
To carry out your link campaigns, the best solution is to use a netlinking agency like NaddraBlog. You will thus have access to a large catalog of authority sites on which your incoming links will be published. You'll also benefit from an all-natural linking strategy that won't expose your site to algorithmic or manual penalties.
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