Indexing is Different From Ranking

People who are conversant with Search Engine optimization (SEO) are well aware of two important components in it-Indexing and Ranking.But it is surprising to find out how people still mistake the two terms as meaning the same. It is not so. Indexing is a completely separate concept from ranking. No doubt both form important components of SEO and web marketing, but both have exclusive and separate identities. One of the biggest myths that some people still have is that indexing means your site will automatically rank well too. Those who think so are very far from the truth.

Indexing is a search engine phenomenon where the search engine spiders search for keys to their content and then indexes them according to the keywords that it considers most important, relevant, updated, fresh, in your website.And if they find the content to match all their requirements and pre-requisites, technical or content related, the site is indexed. And in order to find out whether your site is indexed or not, all you have to do is select two or three words in a unique phrase from the webpages concerned and search for that phrase by putting it in quotation marks and placing it in Google's index. If your page(s) are indexed, they will appear in the search results.

Ranking on the other hand is the process where the search engines decide what position the site should be allocated once it is indexed. The ranking of your website depends upon the clear and focused approach of the content on your website and the number of relevant and quality links coming to your site. For example, the press releases and online magazines rank better than other normal sites as a result of the great number of incoming links to them.

Thus both indexing and ranking are different concepts. Your website may be indexed a long time back, but it is not necessary that if it is indexed it will be ranked well too. Ranking follows a different criteria than indexing and does not have anything to do with indexing.

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