Search Engines Rank Pages

Search Engines Rank Pages

How search engines rank pages

Discovering, crawling, and indexing content is merely the first part of the puzzle. Search engines also need a way to rank matching results when a user performs a search. This is the job of search engine algorithms.

Each search engine has unique algorithms for ranking web pages. But as Google is by far the most widely used search engine (at least in the western world), that’s the one we’re going to focus on throughout the rest of this guide.

Google famously has 200+ ranking factors.

Nobody knows what all of these ranking factors are, but we do know about the key ones.

Let’s discuss a few of them.

• Backlinks
• Relevance
• Freshness
• Topical authority
• Page speed
• Mobile-friendliness