“What’s the difference between crawling, rendering, indexing and ranking?”
Lily Ray recently shared that she asks this question to prospective employees when hiring for the Amsive Digital SEO team. Google’s Danny Sullivan thinks it’s an excellent one.
As foundational as it may seem, it isn’t uncommon for some practitioners to confuse the basic stages of search and conflate the process entirely.
In this article, we’ll get a refresher on how search engines work and go over each stage of the process.
Why knowing the difference matters
I recently worked as an expert witness on a trademark infringement case where the opposing witness got the stages of search wrong.
Two small companies declared they each had the right to use similar brand names.
The opposition party’s “expert” erroneously concluded that my client conducted improper or hostile SEO to outrank the plaintiff’s website.
He also made several critical mistakes in describing Google’s processes in his expert report, where he asserted that:
- Indexing was web crawling.
- The search bots would instruct the search engine how to rank pages in search results.
- The search bots could also be “trained” to index pages for certain keywords.
An essential defense in litigation is to attempt to exclude a testifying expert’s findings – which can happen if one can demonstrate to the court that they lack the basic qualifications necessary to be taken seriously.
As their expert was clearly not qualified to testify on SEO matters...
Read Full Story: https://searchengineland.com/search-stages-crawling-rendering-indexing-ranking-387057
Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.
