How On-Earth Does Google Decide Who Wins?
How On-Earth Does Google Decide Who Wins?
Blog Article
Ryan Walsh
Grab a mug—mine’s an oat-milk flat white—and let’s geek out about the invisible robots that decide whether our painstaking blog posts ever see the light of day. Yup, I’m talking about Google, the all-knowing librarian that lives in our pockets.
I’ve spent an embarrassing number of evenings watching Google Search Console graphs the way other folks binge Netflix. And here’s what I’ve learned: if you want shoppers stampeding to your site for free (a.k.a. organic traffic), you have to charm three very picky gatekeepers—Crawl, Index, and Rank.
Stage 1: “Crawl” (Send in the Spiders)
Picture Googlebot as a hyperactive spider hopped-up on espresso shots—skittering from link to link, sniffing out fresh pages and poking its nose into updates. No crawl, no party. If the bot can’t find your snazzy new “Ultimate Guide to Fuzzy Slippers,” it might as well be scribbled on a napkin.
Pro-tips from my own scar-tissue:
Feed it links. Internal links are like breadcrumb trails; external backlinks are neon billboards on the highway.
Give it a map. An XML sitemap is the polite way of saying, “Hey, robot friend, here’s the tour route.”
Mind the crawl budget. Google allots each site a chunk of crawl time. If your server creaks like a haunted house or your JavaScript needs a PhD to read, the bot bails early. Upgrade the hosting; your future self will thank you.
Stage 2: “Index” (The Gigantic Filing Cabinet)
Okay, the spider has crawled. Now Google asks: “Is this page worth shelving in my index, or is it another sketchy street flyer?” Low-effort, duplicate, or outright spammy pages get tossed. Quality, on the other hand, gets a shiny library card.
I once killed an entire Sunday rewriting a client’s About page because some genius had slapped a “noindex” tag on it—effectively hiding it from search entirely. Don’t be that genius. Double-check your meta robots settings.
Stage 3: “Rank” (The Hunger Games)
Here’s where the real blood sport starts. Google juggles 200-plus ranking factors—speed, backlinks, UX metrics, even whether users stick around to read or bounce faster than a rubber ball. The algorithm feels like a Rubik’s Cube that re-scrambles itself every morning.
So, what actually moves the needle? In my experience:
Killer content. Forget robotic keyword stuffing. Answer the question better than anyone else. Bring anecdotes, stats, war stories—whatever proves you know your stuff.
Backlink authority. Think of each quality backlink as a vote of confidence. But beware: spammy links are as helpful as fake Instagram followers.
User experience. Fast pages, mobile-friendly layouts, clean navigation. If visitors huff and hit “back,” Google notices.
Yes, there are hundreds more levers—title tags, alt text, schema, Core Web Vitals—but obsessing over micro-details while your article is thin, outdated, or downright boring is putting lipstick on a llama.
EEAT, Helpful-Content & Other Alphabet Soup
Google’s newer systems look for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust (EEAT). Translation: show your credentials, cite reputable sources, and be transparently real. I sprinkle case-study screenshots, author bios, and the occasional self-deprecating joke—because robots aside, humans still read this stuff.
And don’t sleep on the Helpful Content update. If your page screams “written for clicks, not people,” it’ll sink faster than my last attempt at sourdough.
Burnout & The “More, More, More” Trap
Confession: I once cranked out 40 blog posts in a month, fuelled by enough espresso to power a small rocket. Traffic spiked… then plateaued. Why? Because quantity ≠ quality. I had to step back, re-read Google’s own advice, and ruthlessly upgrade my best pieces instead of hustling more mediocre ones. Lesson learned.
Turning Tribal Knowledge into Page-One Glory
Every business has expertise that competitors can’t copy: behind-the-scenes processes, customers’ weird questions, war stories from the trenches. Wrap that wisdom in a well-structured guide, sprinkle in imagery, quote other pros, and you’ll stand out amidst the generic fluff.
Oh, and shout-out to my favourite WordPress plugin: Yoast. Two clicks, and boom—XML sitemap. The bots eat it up.
The Bottom Line (Because Coffee’s Getting Cold)
Google isn’t out to make our lives miserable. Its one job is to serve the best answer. Our job is to be that answer—technically accessible, genuinely helpful, undeniably authoritative.
So next time you’re hunched over the keyboard at 2 a.m., ask: “Will this article make a stranger’s life easier?” If yes, hit publish, build some quality links, and keep an eye on those dwell-time stats. If no, top up the mug and give it another pass.
May your crawl budget be generous, your indexation swift, and your rankings ever upward. See you on page one—ideally above me, so I can point and say, “Hey, I helped them get there.” ????