Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking

Beginner's Guide

Black Hat

Search engine optimization practices that violates Google's quality guidelines.

Crawling

The process by which search engines discover your pages.

De-indexed

Refers to a page or group of pages being removed from Google’s index.

Featured Snippets

Organic answer boxes that appear at the top of SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) for certain queries.

Google My Business / Google Business Profile

A free listing available to local businesses.

Image Carousels

Image results in some SERPs that are scrollable from left to right.

Intent

Intent refers to what users really want from the words they typed into the search bars.

KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

Measurable value that indicates how well an activity is achieving a goal.
EX: Sales growth, customer satisfaction score, etc.

Local Pack

A pack of typically three local businesses listings that appear for local-intent searches such as “oil change near me”.

Organic

Earned placement in search results, as opposed to paid advertisements.

People Also Ask Boxes

A box in some SERPs featuring a list of questions related to the query and their answers.

Query

Words typed into the search bar.

Ranking

Ordering search results by relevance to the query.

Search Engine

An information retrieval program that searches for items in a database that match the request input by the user.
EX: Google, Bing, Yahoo.

SERP Features

Results displayed in a non-standard format.

SERP

Stands for “Search Engine Results Page” - the page you see after conducting a search.

Traffic

Visits to a website.

URL

Uniform Resource Locations are the locations or addresses for individual pieces of content on the web.

Webmaster Guidelines

Guidelines published by search engines like Google and Bing for the purpose of helping site owners create content that will be found, indexed and performed well in search results.

White Hat

Search engine optimization practices that comply with Google’s quality guidelines.

Advanced Search Operators

Special characters and commands you can type into the search bar for further specify your query.

Algorithms

A process or formula by which stored information is retrieved and ordered in meaningful ways.

Backlinks

Also known as “inbound links” - links from other websites that point to your website.

Bots

Also known as “crawlers” or “spiders” - These are what scour the internet to find content.

Caching

A saved version of your web page.

Caffeine

Google’s web indexing system. Caffeine is the index or collection of web content, whereas Googlebot is the crawler that goes out and finds the content.

Citations

Also known as a “business listing”, a citation is a web-based reference to a local business’s name, address and phone number (NAP).

Cloaking

Showing different content to search engines than you show to human visitors.

Crawl Budget

The average number of pages a search engine bot will crawl on your site.

Crawler Directives

Instructions to the crawler regarding what you want it to crawl and index on your site.

Distance

In the context of the local pack, distance refers to proximity, or the location of the searcher and/or the location specified in the query.

Engagement

Data that represents how searchers interact with your site from search results.

Google Quality Guidelines

Published guidelines from Google detailing tactics that are forbidden because they are malicious and/or intended to manipulate search results.

Google Search Console

A free program provided by Google that allows site owners to monitor how their site is doing.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the language used to create webpages.

Index Coverage Report

A report in Google Search Console that shows you the indexation status of your site’s pages.

Index

A huge database of all the content search engine crawlers have discovered and deem good enough to serve up to searchers.

Internal Links

Links on your own site that point to your other pages on the same site.

JavaScript

A programming language that adds dynamic elements to static web pages.

Login Forms

Refers to pages that require login authentication before a visitor can access the content.

Manual Penalty

Refers to a Google “Manual Action” where a human reviewer has determined certain pages on your site violates Google’s quality guidelines.

Meta Robots Tag

Pieces of code that provide crawlers instructions for how to crawl or index web page content.

Navigation

A list of links that help visitors navigate to other pages on your site. Often, these appear in a list at the top of your website (“top navigation”), on the side column of your website (“side navigation”), or at the bottom of your website (“footer navigation”).

NoIndex Tag

A meta tag that instructions a search engine not to index the page it’s on.

PageRank

A component of Google's core algorithm. It is a link analysis program that estimates the importance of a web page by measuring the quality and quantity of links pointing to it.

Personalization

Refers to the way a search engine will modify a person’s results on factors unique to them, such as their location and search history.

Prominence

In the context of the local pack, prominence refers to businesses that are well-know, well-liked in the real world.