Googlebot is Google's web crawling bot (sometimes also called a "spider"). Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated website pages to be added to the Google index (where search results show).

How does the Googlebot work

Google use like a zillion computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web. Googlebot uses an algorithmic process to determine which websites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each website.

As Googlebot visits each of these websites, it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead page links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Hot Tip: It takes about 1 month for Googlebot to discover changes to your content, new links to your pages, and overall structure of your website. And it will take another month or two to put all those factors and their algorithms to re-assess your relevancy and authority before those changes are reflected in the search results page.

Being patient and true to your strategy will help you stay focused on the SEO process. Another thing to expect with SEO is change within the search engines, such as algorithm changes that Google makes.

What are algorithm changes

It's super important to realise that the Google algorithm does continuously change and you do need to keep up with these.

You have to work with these changes and pretty much follow through with whatever Google suggests you do. It is a good idea to sign up to the Google Analytics Blog - this will provide you with lots of great advice and any upcoming changes to their algorithm.

Hot Tip: When doing any SEO work remember that you're actually optimising for two audiences; Google and real human beings.

The great thing is that Google knows that and is a user-focused search engine. Their ultimate goal is to generate search results that people will find useful and helpful. 

If you build your authority and create content that's interesting to people, and ensure your page design and layout is optimised for the web, the long-term and consistent goal of Google is to reward that.