What Is Indexing?
Indexing is the process a search engine uses to organize and store the website information it found during the crawling process in the index.
The outcome of the indexing process depends on several factors, such as site maps, non-index tags in the website’s HTML, and canonicalization. A website is included in the search engine’s index if the algorithm doesn’t detect any issues during the analysis.
Google search engine utilizes the process called inverted indexing to avoid analyzing the entire index database to detect relevant information. Inverted indexing generates a database of text elements and pointers.
Pointers enable the algorithm to identify documents that contain specific text elements. Google algorithm employs tokenization to assign their true meaning to words which enables it to access the data it needs much faster.
Algorithms analyze the information stored in the search engine index using a variety of factors to serve relevant web pages and content to users in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant queries.
Visit the SEO Glossary
Go to the SEO Glossary to find more terms and definitions that relate to the field of search engine optimization.
The Editorial Staff at SEO Chatter is a team of search engine optimization and digital marketing experts led by Stephen Hockman with more than 15 years of experience in search engine marketing. We publish guides on the fundamentals of SEO for beginner marketers.
