Ranking (Serving)
The instant a query arrives and the engine selects and orders the pages it believes answer it best.
Analogy Mental model
You ask the librarian a question. She does not read the whole library, she reads the cards, weighs who you are and what you have asked before, and hands you ten books in an order she can defend.
In practice What you actually do
Ranking is an output. You influence it only through inputs: what the page covers, whether it is crawlable and fast, whether other sites vouch for it, whether the author is a verifiable person in the field. Pick the two inputs you can move this quarter and leave the rest alone.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
A new page can hit the top ten for a few days and then fall past fifty. The engine is testing real user response against a hypothesis. Do not rewrite the page in a panic on day three, and do not report the peak as a result.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →