Indexing is the last piece of the puzzle before your content is ranked. It starts with the discovery phase, crawling, and indexing. Indexing is the process search engines like Google use to find, analyze, and store page information.
Analogy: SEO as a Restaurant
There are 4 phases leading to indexing:
1. Discovery
Discovery is the initial phase where search engines find your website. Imagine SEO is a restaurant, and search engines are food critics. Search engines visit your restaurant (website) and analyze the menu (content) to see what dishes (pages) you offer.
2. Crawling
Crawling is the process by which search engine crawlers, like Googlebot, gather information from your website (restaurant). They discover the pages (dishes on the menu) and gather data about them.
3. Rendering
There’s a crucial technical phase called rendering between the crawling and indexing phases. Rendering happens when a search engine tries to understand the code of a page, just like a chef analyzes and cooks a recipe.
Search engines make a copy of the discovered pages to understand your content and download your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When a search engine processes the downloaded code, it renders it. It is like a chef cooking a recipe. If rendering is NOT complete, the result will be like a half-cooked dish. The recipe is correct, but there is a problem.
Before you cook anything, you must understand which ingredients to use and how to prepare the recipe. Search engines analyze your site like a chef understands the ingredients and instructions of a recipe. They extract your content, such as text, images and videos. Rendering bridges the raw data (raw ingredients) discovered during crawling and the organized information stored in the search engine’s index.
Rendering allows search engines to see the page’s final “human” version (including text, images, videos and interactive elements). It is a cooked recipe. With rendering, search engines would gain valuable content and understand the structure of your website and pages.
Rendering is the process that turns code into a visual page. It ensures that your content, layout and design are accurately “understood” by search engines. Rendering (cooking) problems can lead to indexing issues. This could make it difficult for users to find your website even if it contains relevant information.
For search engines, each new website is like a new recipe. Poor rendering means the chef will have to prepare this new dish without being able to cook it normally. Imagine the best restaurant in the world, with the best ingredients and chefs.
4. Storing
Once pages are crawled and rendered, they are stored in a giant but secret database. Pages crawled by Google but not indexed are stored in this secret database and may or may not be indexed in the future.
The process of indexing involves several key phases: discovery, crawling, rendering, and storing. Each phase is crucial for ensuring that search engines can accurately analyze and rank your content. Proper rendering and indexing are vital for SEO success. Ensuring that each phase is handled correctly will help your website achieve better visibility and ranking in search results.
