- Last updated: October 2025
It was 2013 when we at Rubber Duckiee first put together a guide in response to: ‘How does Google rank websites?’
The pace of technological change in the time since has felt so fast we assumed everything in that original guide would be old hat now. But, are we all searching in a drastically different way 12 years on? If not, how many of the fundamentals that were the case then might still be so now?
To answer this we have looked back at our original advice and assessed what from then still stands, what doesn’t and then added to this with best practice as of now (October 2025). Putting this in context we also set out how search engines actually work – what leads to Google serving up the results you see on hitting enter.
How does Google rank websites?
Lots of us know we should be doing something around Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), but often don’t know where to start. The whole topic can feel very technical and quite overwhelming. To combat this we’re developing a series of guides covering what we tend to find ourselves discussing with our clients when talking about our SEO services. In refreshing this piece it will be the first of these guides and aims to explain how Google actually delivers the search results you see, so you can then better understand what to focus on for your own website when it comes to SEO.
To begin with, in order for Google to be able to rank your website your website must be ‘crawled’. This process refers to a piece of software – known as the Googlebot – first discovering your website’s content and then visiting it to understand what it’s about.
You can submit pages manually to be crawled, but for the most part pages in Google’s index are found organically, by Google’s crawlers as they go hunting what’s available on the web by moving from link to link. Unsurprisingly considering the size of the internet now, it’s via an algorithmic process that the decision is made as to which sites to crawl, how often and how many pages to retrieve.
The crawling process, once your site has been discovered, or re-discovered, involves the Googlebot downloading all the text, images and video on that page so it can then begin interpreting them.
Next comes ‘indexing’. This is where Google analyses your content and decides how and where to store it within its vast library of web pages. It’s only once these steps have been taken that your content is eligible to be matched with someone’s search query.
To note – not all pages crawled are guaranteed to be indexed by Google. Likewise, just because a page is indexed doesn’t mean it will be found in search results.
Once your site is in its index, Google uses a large number of different signals and factors to determine how useful your page is for a specific query. An understanding of these will really help you prioritise action to take on your own website so as to achieve your ranking goals.
With so many different signals and factors used by Google it might be tempting to target those given most weight by Google. However, the weight Google applies varies according to the query, as it sets out in how search systems work. For instance, for a health related query Google will draw heavily on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), whereas if someone is searching for opinion then E-E-A-T will matter but is likely given less weight than social proof signals like reviews.
As just touched upon E-E-A-T and social proof make up some of the signals used by Google to establish content’s usefulness. Other factors include: freshness, language (matching content to query), localisation, keywords and page experience (eg. is it mobile friendly).
In our next piece we’ll be covering these signals and factors in more detail and how they should feed into your overall SEO strategy. In the meantime, if you’re a business owner or comms team wanting advice get in touch today.