So while much of what I'm saying is technically still guesswork, it's based on several conversations I've had with some Googlers. It's also important to note that unless I specifically say "Google said this", Google didn't. Ok, enough CMA-type talk. Let's go. First, let's understand what indexing means If you saw my talk at the SEJ Summit in Chicago, I went pretty deep into the , and rankings — the essential elements of any search algorithm. It is important to distinguish them. I assumed this was SEO101 material, but saw some confusion arise in a few Twitter chats the other day. Advertising Continue reading below Crawl is the process by which Google follows links on the web to discover pages.
This is where they likely discover your fax list content and where they can also apply and disavow file rules. Indexing is the process of turning your web page into something more usable and storing it in their database. There's a lot of cool stuff going on here, like word vectors, and all sorts of other awesome computing stuff that I'd love to talk about with you over a few beers. For our purposes, however, indexing involves making a copy of your page in a format useful to the ranking algorithm. It's basically caffeine, from what I understand. The fetch is the first part of the search query. This comes before ranking in my example, but chances are the actual algorithm is performing fetching and ranking at the same time. The fetch is the part where the engine says give me anything relevant to this query.
This is the part where those word vectors and are put to good use. This is also the part where most likely comes into play. Hummingbird too (I think - not that it matters.) Ranking is the part that obsesses us the most. This is where they rank the results based on the number of factors we are discussing today. Much of this likely happens during the recovery phase. However, some factors (like penalties, speed, and even mobile compatibility) are likely to occur after recovery. At least, that's how I would code it - but I'm not as smart of an engineer as some people at Google. Alright, what does any of this have to do with the Mobile First Index? I'm getting there, but the WordPress plugin says I need a few hundred more words, so be patient. (Just kidding, I swear this is helpful.) So what is Mobile First indexing?