About Rankpedia

I am Elin Marsh. I write every entry on this site, and nobody pays me to say anything on it.

I have worked in search since 2013. I started as the person at a mid-size ecommerce retailer who got handed "the Google thing" because nobody else wanted it, spent six years in-house across retail and B2B software, and have been freelance since 2019 doing technical audits and site migrations. I live in Bristol. My mother is Swedish, my father is English, and I grew up between Gothenburg and here.

I still take a small number of clients. That work pays for this domain and it stays entirely off this site: no client is named here, and no entry has ever been written to help one.

Why this exists

For years, looking up a definition meant landing on a 2,800-word agency post that opened with "In today's ever-evolving digital landscape", took nine paragraphs to actually define the term, and finished with a demo booking form. The answer was usually in there somewhere. It was never in the first screen.

So I kept my own notes instead. A plain text file, one paragraph per concept, written so that a junior colleague could read it in thirty seconds and be right. Over about eight years that file grew to several hundred entries and became the thing I actually opened when I needed to check something.

This site is that file, published, expanded and properly sourced. Nothing more complicated than that.

What I promise

There is no company behind this site and no editorial board to point at, so these promises are the only credentials on offer. They are meant to be checkable.

1. No ads, no affiliate links, no sponsored entries, no paid placement. Nobody can buy a mention, a link, or a better position in a comparison. Not now, not later.
2. No lead capture. No newsletter wall, no gated PDF, no "book a call". There is one email address and it goes to me.
3. Every entry is dated. The date shown is the day I last read the entry end to end and confirmed it — not the day a build script touched the file.
4. Sources are named, linked and primary. Google's own documentation, the W3C, schema.org, or a vendor's own docs for an entry about their product. Not another blog's summary of them.
5. Corrections are public. Send one to elin@rankpedia.org. If it is right, the entry changes and the change appears on the changelog.
6. Where the field genuinely disagrees, the entry says so rather than picking whichever version sounds most confident.
7. Client work is disclosed and kept separate. See above.

If I ever break one of these, the site stops being worth reading, and I would rather it did.

What this site is not

It is not a course, a tool, a community, or a funnel into consulting. It is not comprehensive — search is a large field and I am one person, so there are gaps, and the index will show you exactly where they are.

It is also not neutral about quality. Where a widely repeated claim has no evidence behind it, the entry says the claim has no evidence behind it. Objectivity means reporting the state of the knowledge accurately, including the parts where the honest answer is that nobody outside Google knows.

How to use it

Search from the box at the top, browse a section, or go through the full alphabetical index. Every entry follows the same shape: the answer in the first sentence, a short summary you can read in ten seconds, then the detail if you want it.

If something is wrong, unclear, or missing, email me. I read all of it, and "this entry does not actually answer the question" is the most useful message you can send.

Reuse

Text on this site is published under Creative Commons BY 4.0. Copy it, translate it, teach from it, quote it in your own documentation. Credit Rankpedia and link back, and that is the whole licence. If it is useful, it should travel.