Pressing Publish feels rather final.
It isn’t.
Let’s go back to the woman with the hard-boiled egg article.
She finishes writing, checks the photographs, gives the article a clear title and presses Publish.
The article is now online. She can open it. She can send the link to a friend. Everything appears to be working.
Then she searches Google for:
how to hard boil eggs
Her article is nowhere to be seen.
That can feel strange the first time it happens. The article exists. Google exists. Why hasn’t one noticed the other?
Because the internet does not have a little doorbell that rings at Google every time somebody publishes something.
Before Google can show her article in a search result, it has to find the article and work out what it is about. It also has to keep enough information about the page to use when somebody searches. Even then, Google still has to decide whether her article is one of the answers worth showing.
Those are separate jobs, and that distinction is important. Once we stop treating them as one mysterious thing Google does, the process gets much easier to picture.
First, Google has to find the page
We met Google’s crawlers in the last article—the tiny spiders with notebooks, at least that’s what I imagine.
The real thing is less entertaining. Google’s main crawler is called Googlebot.
Googlebot moves around public parts of the web looking for pages. One of the main ways it discovers something new is by following a link from a page it already knows about.
Imagine our egg writer already has an article about making omelettes. She adds a link from that article to her new hard-boiled egg recipe. The next time Googlebot visits the omelette article, it can follow that link and discover the new one.
Google can also discover pages through a sitemap. When most people hear sitemap, they may picture something that helps a visitor find their way around a website. That is not the kind we mean here.
This sitemap is a special file made for search engines. It lists the pages and files the publisher considers important so crawlers such as Googlebot have another way to find them.
Either way, Google first has to learn that the new page exists.
Then Googlebot may visit the page and read what is there.
That visit is called crawling.
A page can be online without Google having found it yet. Google can also discover a page and still not crawl it immediately. Some pages are blocked from Googlebot, some sit behind logins, and sometimes Google simply does not fetch a particular page right away.
So published and crawled are not the same thing.
Google has to understand the page
Once Googlebot reaches the egg article, Google starts processing what it found.
It looks at the title, the words on the page, photographs, videos and other information that can help it understand what is there.
Our example page is pretty easy.
The title says How to Make Hard-Boiled Eggs. The article talks about cooking times, cooling the eggs and getting the shells off without destroying breakfast.
Google has a good idea what the page is about.
This stage is called indexing.
Google takes what it learns from the pages it crawls and stores information about many of them in its enormous organized collection—the Google index.
Getting into the index matters, but it is not the same as earning a good place in the search results.
It simply means the article is now one of the possible answers Google can consider when somebody searches.
Now somebody searches
You are back in the kitchen. The water is getting hot and you type:
how to hard boil eggs
Google does not head back out onto the web and start looking for an answer from scratch. It turns to the information already stored in its index.
There may be thousands of possible answers.
Recipes. Cooking sites. Videos. Food magazines. A page about easy-peel eggs. Another about cooking eggs at high altitude. Probably several pages insisting they have finally solved hard-boiled eggs forever.
Google has to decide which ones deserve to be put in front of you, and in what order.
That order is ranking.
This is where it helps to forget the idea that every page has one permanent score attached to it.
Google is not stamping our egg article:
92/100 — congratulations, you are number four forever.
It is comparing possible answers to the particular search you just made.
A lot can go into that decision. Google looks at what you searched for and tries to work out what you mean. It looks at how closely different pages fit that search and whether they seem useful. Depending on the search, your language, location and even the device you are using can matter too.
That last part makes more sense with a different search.
Suppose you type:
coffee near me
Now location matters enormously.
The best café in Paris may be wonderful, but it is not much help if you are standing in Chicago holding an empty mug.
Change the search and Google has a different decision to make.
Our hard-boiled egg article may be an excellent answer for:
how to hard boil eggs
It may still be useful for:
easy peel hard boiled eggs
if it actually explains how to get the shells off cleanly.
For:
coffee near me
it should be nowhere in sight.
So a page does not really have one fixed ranking.
It has a place—or no place at all—for a particular search.
That is the part worth remembering.
Ranking is Google deciding which pages make the most sense for the search someone is making right now.
If her article is missing, what does that actually mean?
Go back to the beginning.
Our writer pressed Publish, searched for her article and found nothing.
At the time, that looked like one problem:
Why isn’t my article showing up?
Now we know it could mean several different things.
Google may not have discovered the page yet.
Googlebot may not have crawled it yet.
Google may know about the page but not have added it to the index yet.
Or all of that may have happened perfectly well and Google simply chose other pages for the search she tried.
Same empty search result. Very different reasons.
Fortunately, she does not have to guess forever.
Google has a free tool called Google Search Console that lets someone who runs a website see some of what Google knows about its pages. One part of it, called URL Inspection, can show whether Google knows about a particular page, whether it has been indexed and information about Googlebot’s last visit.
We do not need to learn Search Console today.
What matters is that the mystery is no longer quite so mysterious.
If the article is missing, she can start working out where in the journey it stopped.
That is considerably more useful than staring at Google and wondering what went wrong.
What can she actually do about it?
She cannot choose where Google puts the article.
But now she knows which parts she can influence.
Suppose Google has not discovered the page.
She can give Googlebot a clearer route to it by linking to the article from another page Google already knows about. She can also make sure it appears in the special sitemap file we talked about earlier.
If Google has already indexed the article, that tells her something different.
Finding the page is no longer the problem.
Now she can look at the search itself.
If she wants the article to appear for:
how to hard boil eggs
does the title make that clear?
Does the article actually answer the question?
Does it give somebody standing over a pot of eggs what they came for?
This is where the SEO work from the last article stops being a definition and becomes something she can actually use.
She cannot tell Google:
Put me first.
What she can do is make the page easy to find, easy to understand and genuinely useful for the person she hopes will find it.
Then Google makes the decision.
From Publish to Search
At the beginning, pressing Publish made the job look finished.
It wasn’t.
Publishing put the article online.
Google still had to discover it.
Googlebot had to crawl it.
Google had to understand enough about the page to add it to the index.
Then somebody had to search for something the article might answer.
Only then did ranking matter.
Seen as one big technical process, crawling, indexing and ranking can sound more complicated than they really are.
Seen as the trip our egg article just took, they are much easier to keep straight:
Find the page.
Work out what it is.
Decide when it makes sense to show it.
Google still gets the final say.
But our writer is not powerless, and she is not just throwing an article onto the internet and hoping for the best.
She can write something useful. She can make the subject clear. She can give Googlebot a sensible path to the page. She can use what she already knows about SEO to make sure the article really fits the search she wants to be found for.
Then she has done the part she can control.
And if it all comes together, somebody standing over a pot of eggs asks Google for help, her article appears among the answers, and the two finally meet.
Tiny spider with notebook and all.