SEO for beginners training – Module 1.1 

Google 
In this lesson we’ll get you up to speed on the basics. First, we’ll review what 
Google does all the way from visiting your page for the first time to ranking the 
page in the search results. We’ll explain crawlers, the Google algorithm, and 
important Google updates. Then, we’ll go deeper into Google’s search results 
page. We’ll discuss the different types of results that could appear on that page, 
like organic and paid results, the Knowledge Graph, and answer boxes. 
 

What does Google do? 

Search engines like Google follow links. Google follows links from one web page 
to another web page. Google’s crawlers spider more than a billion pages every 
day. 
 
A search engine like Google consists of:  
 
1. a crawler 
2. an index 
3. an algorithm 
 
We’ll explore these terms in further detail below.  
 

Crawlers, spiders or bots 

A crawler follows the links on the web. A crawler is also called a robot, a bot, or 
a spider. It goes around the internet 24/7. Once it comes to a website, it saves 
the HTML version of a page in a gigantic database, called the index. This index is 
updated every time the crawler comes around your website and finds a new or 
revised version of it. Depending on how important Google deems your site and 
the amount of changes you make on your website, the crawler comes around 
more or less often. 
 

 
1 
 

How does Google find your site? 

For Google to know of the existence of your website, there first has to be a link 
from another site – one Google already knows – to your site. Following that link 
will lead to the first crawler-session and the first save in the index. In the old 
days you could submit your website to a search engine. Today, that isn’t 
possible anymore. Search engines nowadays follow all links on the web. 
 

Google’s secret algorithm 

After indexing your website, Google can show your website in the search 
results. Google has a specific algorithm that decides which pages it will show in 
which order. How this algorithm works is a secret. Nobody knows exactly which 
factors decide how Google determines search results. Moreover, factors and 
their importance change very often. Testing and experimenting gives us at 
Yoast a good feel for the important factors and the changes in these factors. 
 

The value of links for search engines 

It’s very important to have a basic understanding of how Google and most other 
search engines use links: they use the number of links pointing to a page to 
determine how important that page is. Both internal links (from the own 
website) as well as external links (from other websites) can help a website to 
rank high in Google. 
 
Some links are more important than others: links from websites that have a lot 
of links themselves are generally more important than links from small websites 
with few external links.  
 

Universal search 
In addition to the organic and the paid results, Google also embeds news items, 
pictures and videos in its search results. This embedment is called universal 
search.  
 

Crawlability 
Depending on how you maintain your website, it can be easy or difficult for 
Google to crawl your website. If you have good crawlability, Google will be able 
to index your site without problems. There are a few ways in which a crawler 

 
2 
 

can be blocked from your website. If the website or a page on your website is 
blocked, you’re telling Google’s crawler: “do not come here, this area is 
forbidden”. You won’t turn up in the search results in most of these cases. 
 
There are several ways you can prevent Google from accessing certain pages. 
We’ll explore them in the Technical SEO module of this course.  
 

Google’s mission 
Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally 
accessible and useful”. In other words: to build the perfect search engine that 
helps people find what they are looking for. Google always wants to show you 
the best result for your search query. Google has updated its algorithm 
numerous times over the years, but their goal remains the same: Google tries 
to get you the best result.  
 
Google gives you the best results by ranking the most relevant and usable 
websites, and combating spam. Sites that are only built to make money, or 
otherwise created purely to rank to make money, should not be on top of the 
search results. Sites that give the user what he or she searched for should 
always be on top. Google also rewards sites that provide good user experience 
(including for instance sites that load fast). 
 

RankBrain 
RankBrain is a Google algorithm, but a very advanced one at that. It is a 
machine learning system that helps Google better decipher the meaning 
behind the terms people search for. It serves the best-matching search results 
related to those queries. When RankBrain was first announced, Google called it 
the third most important ranking factor. Presumably, RankBrain can somehow 
summarize what a page is about, evaluate the relevance of search results, and 
teach itself to get even better at it with time. The common understanding is that 
RankBrain, in part, relies on the traditional SEO factors (links, content, keywords, 
etc.), but also looks at other factors that are specific to the search term. Then, it 
identifies the most relevant pages in the index and arranges the respective 
results in SERPs (search engine result pages). 
 

 
3 
 

Important Google updates 

Throughout the years, Google introduced several major updates. We’ll discuss 
the most important ones of the last seven years and the implications of these 
updates. 
 
Panda (2011) 
In 2011 Google released its first P
​ anda update​. This Panda update tried to 
diminish those websites which were purely created to rank in the search 
engines. Panda mostly focused on on-page factors. In other words, it 
determined whether the site offered information about the search term visitors 
used. Two types of sites were hit especially hard by the Panda update:  
 
1. affiliate sites (sites which mainly exist to link to other pages) 
2. sites with very thin content  
 
Google has periodically re-run the Panda algorithm since its first release. 
 
Penguin (2012) 
A year later, Google rolled out the first ​Penguin update​. Penguin particularly 
looked at the links websites got from other sites. It judged whether the sites 
linking to your website like and admire your products or content. If the links 
were artificial, Google no longer assigned link value. In the past, lots of people 
tried to boost their ranking by buying links. Penguin tried to diminish the effect 
of buying, exchanging or otherwise artificially creating links. Websites with a lot 
of these artificial links got hit hard by this update. They lost their place in 
Google's ranking. This update has also run several times since its first inception 
and is now even said to be run continuously. 
 
Hummingbird (2013) 

In August 2013, Google released H

​ ummingbird​. In this update, Google laid 
down the groundwork for voice-search. Hummingbird pays more attention to 
each individual word in a query, ensuring that the whole search phrase is taken 
into account, rather than just particular words. This should lead to results 
matching the entire query better. The results were not immediately clear, but 
over time, Google started showing more answer boxes in the search results 
(see Image 1), that gave the answer directly instead of enticing people to click 

 
4 
 

on to a web page. Voice-search has become more and more important as more 
devices (Google Home, Alexa) have started using voice search.  
 

 
Image 1: Answer box in Google’s search results 

 
Mobilegeddon (2015) 
In 2015, Google introduced the mobile update, dubbed “​Mobilegeddon​” by the 
industry. As more and more people use Google on mobile devices, Google used 
this update to boost sites that have mobile friendly pages in its mobile search 
results. Around the same time, Google showed that mobile devices accounted 
for over 50% of all search queries.  
 

Possum (2016) 

In September 2016, the ​Possum update​ applied several recent changes to 
Google's local ranking filter. After Possum, Google has shown more varied 
results depending on the physical location of the searcher (the closer you are to 
a business physically, the more likely it is that you'll see it among local results) 
and the phrasing of the query (even very similar variations now produce 
different results). 
 
Mobile indexing first algorithm (2018) 
Last but not least, Google is currently rolling out their ​mobile indexing first 
algorithm​. This means Google will create and rank its search listings based on 

 
5 
 

the mobile version of a site, even for listings that are shown to desktop users. 
As more and more searches happen on mobile, Google wants its index and 
results to represent the majority of their users, who are mobile searchers. This 
means that you need to make sure the content and links on the mobile site are 
similar enough to the desktop version so that Google can consume the proper 
content and rank your site as well as it did by crawling your desktop site. 
 

Google’s search results page 

Almost everybody knows what the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) 
looks like. We’ve all been there. We encounter that page with every search we 
do. However, it’s not always clear what elements search results consist of 
exactly. Which of those results are paid for and which are not? And did you 
know you actively need to provide Google with extra information to create 
some of them? We’ll take you through the Google SERP and make sure you’re 
up to speed on the difference between paid results and organic results, 
snippets, featured results, Knowledge Graphs, and answer boxes. We’ll start 
with how the page looks as a whole and then zoom into the different types of 
search results you can encounter. 
 

Different looks of the SERP 

The default page of Google’s SERP is a page on which different results appear. 
Google decides which results fit your search query best. That could be “normal” 
results – a blue title with a green link and a black description below – but also 
news results, shopping results, images, or a Knowledge Graph. 
 
What the SERP looks like largely depends on what you’re searching for. If you’re 
searching for a product you can buy, Google will show shop results on the 
SERP. For example, if you’re searching for an electric guitar for kids, Google 
shows a page that starts with shopping results, as shown in Image 2. For a site 
to show up there, it’ll have to pay Google – note the word “sponsored” in the 
upper right corner. 
 

 
6 
 

 
Image 2: Shopping results on the SERP 

 
However, if you’re searching for information about the planet Mars, you’ll 
encounter a totally different looking SERP. In Image 3 you can see that when 
you’re searching for “Mars”, you’ll get a SERP with news articles and a Knowledge 
Graph (the block on the right) with lots of information about the planet Mars. 
 

 
Image 3: SERP with news and a Knowledge Graph when searching for “Mars” 
 

If you want to, you can apply some filters to the search results yourself. Below 
the search bar in which you enter your queries is a menu which gives you the 
option of filtering results. You can filter images, videos, maps, shopping, books, 
flights, and finance (see Image 4). 

 
7 
 

 
Image 4: Filters for the search results 
 
However, the “All” option is far and away the most important one, so in this 
lesson, we’ll focus on that. Let’s take a closer look at the different elements a 
search results page can contain.  
 

Sponsored results and ads 

Google shows both paid and non-paid results. We call the latter organic results. 
It can be pretty hard to notice the difference between the two. The first couple 
of results are often taken by advertisements. Companies pay Google to show 
up as one of the first results for a certain search term. Sometimes it’s only one 
ad, but Google can show more ads as well. This depends on how many people 
search for a search term and who wants to pay for it. The cost of advertising is 
also related to the popularity of the search term. 
 

 
Image 5: Paid results 
 
You’ll recognize a paid result by a little green box with the word “Ad” shown on 
the left of the link to the website. The shopping results in Google, as shown in 

 
8 
 

Image 2, are also paid results. If you want to advertise on Google, you should 
check out ​Google Ads​. 
 

Organic results 
The organic results are all of the results that are not paid for. The organic 
results that are shown first are the results that fit the search query of the user 
best, according to Google’s algorithm. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims to 
improve the chances to rank in the organic search results.  
 

 
Image 6: Organic result 

 
Research shows that as much as a third of the total traffic comes from the 
number one result, and 17% from the second result. That means that about 
half of the searchers click one of the first two results. Moreover, 90% of the 
searchers doesn’t get beyond the first page of the search results. The numbers 
steadily decline for each result. So being at the top of the search results is 
hugely important. 
 

Snippets 
Now let’s zoom into the individual search results. We call every separate search 
result a snippet. So, the organic result shown in Image 6 is a snippet. A standard 
snippet consists of three elements: 
 
1. a title (in blue) 
2. a URL or slug (in green) 
3. a meta description (in black) 
 

 
9 
 

In the meta description, you should give a clear description of what your page is 
about. Your meta description should entice users to click the result, so it’s 
hugely important. With our plugin, you can determine the title and slug, and 
give Google a suggestion for the meta description. We’ll explain how to do that 
in lesson 3 of this module.  
 
Sometimes, there’s more to these snippets than just the three elements we 
discussed above. A snippet could show extra information between the URL and 
the description.  

 
Image 7: Rich snippet 

 
We call these snippets with extra information “rich snippets”. A rich snippet of a 
pizza recipe could contain a picture of the pizza, the rating and the number of 
votes, the preparation time and the number of calories (see Image 7). You’ll 
learn more about rich snippets and other rich results in module 3 of this 
course. 
 

Featured results 
Sometimes, a result is set apart from the regular search results, usually at the 
top of the page. This is called a featured result. 
 

 
10 
 

 
Image 8: Featured result 

 
A featured snippet is a highlighted search box that answers the question you 
type into the Google search bar. Featured snippets often appear as a 
paragraph or a bulleted list, accompanied by an image. Since this featured 
snippet box is situated above the regular organic search results, everybody is 
bound to notice this. So, you can imagine the effect that might have. Having 
your content as a featured snippet not only brings in a lot of traffic, but it also 
proves your authority on the subject – Google picked you, right? 
 

Knowledge Graph 
Google’s Knowledge Graph box is that big block of information that appears on 
the right-hand side of your desktop screen after entering a search term.  
 

 
11 
 

 
Image 9: Knowledge Graph on the SERP 

 
This block contains relevant, context-specific information regarding your search. 
According to Google, this information is retrieved from many sources, including 
the ​CIA World Factbook​ and Wikipedia. We’ll go into Knowledge Graphs in more 
detail in module 3 of this course. 
 

Answer boxes 
An answer box appears somewhere between the organic search results. It’ll give 
suggestions for questions that relate to the search query you typed in.  
 
 

 
Image 10: Answer box 
 

 
12 
 

 
Image 11: Answer box when clicked on a question 
 
If you’re searching for Yoast SEO, you’ll encounter the answer box shown in 
Image 10 between the organic search results. Clicking on one of the 
suggestions will give a direct answer to the specific question, as shown in Image 
11. 
 

Conclusion 
In this lesson, we’ve explained how Google works. We’ve seen that SEO is 
the practice of optimizing websites to make them reach a high position in 
Google’s – or another search engine’s – search results. Moreover, we’ve 
discussed all of the different types of search results that could appear on 
Google’s SERP.  
 

 
13