Google

Google runs the search engine that most SEO work is ultimately aimed at. Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and based in Mountain View, California, it handles the large majority of the world’s searches, so how Google crawls, renders, indexes, and ranks pages sits at the centre of the field.

How Google talks to the SEO community

Google’s Search Relations team is the official bridge between its search engineers and the people doing SEO. Its advocates, among them John Mueller and Martin Splitt, field questions and publish guidance through the Search Central blog and documentation, the Search Off the Record podcast, Search Central Live events, office-hours sessions, and short explainers such as the #AskGooglebot series.

Where SEOs actually meet Google

Day to day, most work with Google runs through a handful of surfaces:

• Google Search Console, including the URL Inspection tool that shows the rendered HTML Google actually indexed.
• Search Central documentation and the spam policies that set out what Google will and will not accept.
• The crawl, render, index, and serve pipeline that decides whether a page is stored and shown. Our indexing signals quiz and Martin Splitt’s talk on debugging JavaScript sites both dig into that pipeline.
• Structured data and rich results, which shape how a listing can appear in the results.

Why Google is in this knowledge graph

Google sits in this graph because so many of the people Fajela tracks work on or alongside its search team, and because its representatives regularly join industry events. Martin Splitt spoke at SEO for Paws 3, and John Mueller at SEO for Paws 2, both editions of the SEO Charity conference.