Eventbrite and SEO: How does Google find our pages?

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One thing that took me by surprise when I started researching SEO was that when a user enters a search term, the results are gathered from Google’s representation of the web not the entire web. For a page to be included in its index, Google must have already parsed, and stored the page’s contents in its databases.

To do this, automated robots known as spiders or crawlers scan the internet for links leading to pages they can index. These crawlers will begin scanning one page, then follow the links they find to then scan and index those pages.

webCrawlers

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Eventbrite and SEO: The Basics

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Search Engine Optimization is important for all sites, but at Eventbrite it’s critical to our business. Many of our pages are created by our organizers, and our ability to surface the events to relevant people is one of the ways we make sure our customers are successful. My name is Beck Cronin-Dixon and I am one of the Software Engineers at Eventbrite focusing on making sure our organizers’ events rank highly in Google and their customers are able to find the events they are looking for.

Before starting at Eventbrite, I was (of course) aware of the term SEO but didn’t fully understand its meaning or role in a company, especially in terms of programming. Through thorough digging I realized it is essential for any website that wants to have its service or products  in front of customers to invest in the right SEO tactics. In this post, I wanted to cover the very basics of SEO that we incorporate into the Eventbrite site and has helped us grow organic traffic year to year. 

When Search Engine Optimization is mentioned I usually receive two kinds of reactions: the first is confusion, and the second is hesitancy. While most people know that SEO is the practice of improving a website’s ranking within search engines they, it’s not often clear on how it can and should be done. 

The days of ‘build it and they will come’ are now over. Websites have to not only think about the quality of their content for users, but also how it will be perceived by search engines. High quality content that attracts a lot of eyes will always win for both. Google heavily weighs in the favor of sites with high authority and relevancy. This is often hard for sites that rely heavily on user generated content. Here at Eventbrite, we are always trying to improve the rankings of our organizers’ events and other Eventbrite pages. We often have to be on the lookout for user generated content that could be deemed duplicate or low content by Google. Too many of these pages could result in a low authority score, or worse, a penalty that can affect the whole site.

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