SEO Data Model

Authority

How much standing one external site carries in one topic, on one day. A site's standing is a combination of the organic traffic it already has and the links pointing at it within a context, which is why it is measured per site and per topic and never per site alone: the same site can have standing on web hosting and none at all on washing machines. Two rows for the same site in two topics are not a duplicate — they are the point.

Neither ingredient is invented here. The traffic is held on the host, because it is true of the site whatever topic is being asked about; the links are what makes the reading topical. One exception is real and is kept on the host as its own flag: the broadly authoritative sites that count in any context.

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Backlink

One placement of a brand on somebody else's site: a link back to one of its pages, or the brand named in their text without one. Both are held here because both are the same piece of work — a business appears in someone else's article, in some topic, on a host whose standing is what decides the worth. has_link tells the two apart, and false is not a missing value: it is a brand mention, and a mention points at no page, so a count that reads an empty page as a defect is counting mentions as broken links.

What decides what a placement is worth is the topic it appears in. Standing is topical: a host can carry it in one subject and none in another, and a placement whose article sits outside the subject its host carries weight in is worth quite moderately in Google's eyes. The broadly authoritative sites are the exception: a piece on Forbes mentioning a brand counts heavily in its favour in any context.

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Channel

How a visitor arrived, as an analytics tool classifies it: organic search, a referral from another site, direct entry, or an AI assistant. In Google's own terms a visit from search is the channel organic with the source google: the channel says what kind of arrival it was, the source says who sent it.

Search work moves more than one of these at once, which is why the classification is kept as its own object rather than as a label on the visit. A placement on a good site is read by search engines as a citation, and people follow it: those arrivals are referral, while the ranking the same placement supports produces organic ones. The same piece of work arrives under two labels, and a practice reading only their sum cannot separate the two effects.

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Content

The text, images and video a site publishes: the first of the three pillars of search — what a business says about itself, and the material that gets indexed and served in AI answers and in Google. It is also one of the three things an SEO practice pays for, alongside the developer work that keeps the site in order and the placements bought on other people's sites, so this is where the first of those three cost lines sits.

Reading content as a volume is the reading this model is built to prevent. What gives a piece of content a chance of ranking is not that it exists, and not that a person rather than a machine produced it, but whether it adds knowledge to its topic. Content that adds nothing still costs what it cost to produce; and a large body of generated content that does not rank demonstrably worsens a site's traffic figures, often looking like a collapse.

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Context

The topic a search belongs to — the subject someone is asking about, rather than the words they used to ask. Many different queries and many different keywords can be the same context: "web analytics for websites", "visit analytics for e-commerce" and "how do I find out where my customers came from" are all one topic, and a practice works on the topic rather than on the phrasings one at a time.

It is a mart of its own, with almost nothing on it, because it is what the rest of the model is judged against. Authority is contextual — standing is topical, and a site can carry it in one subject and none in another — and whether a page adds new knowledge is measured against a topic. Leaving the context out is what an entry-level practitioner does: calling a site authoritative because it is large and gets traffic, and buying a placement on it whose value in Google's eyes turns out to be quite moderate. The more often a site is cited within a context, the better its chance of coming up, and coming up high, for it.

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Crawl

One fetch of one page by one robot. A row is a single arrival, not a robot: a robot can fetch the same page more than once, and each fetch is its own row. Keeping the grain at the fetch is what lets crawling be read as behaviour over time rather than as a list of who is out there.

A crawler landing on a site learns its content and its links. The internal ones lead it to internal pages, which it also visits — each of those visits another row here. An external one may send it to a page it did not know, and that page belongs to somebody else and has no row in this model, so the fetch names a host and no page.

That is why this mart reaches the crawl rules by two routes rather than one. A fetch of the site's own page reaches them through the page and its site; a fetch of somebody else's page has only the route through the indexing request — one is the rules of the site whose page was fetched, the other the rules the run itself read.

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Google Search Console

The property registered with Google: Google's own facility where a site is entered directly, as a claim of ownership and a request that it be crawled — and Google goes and crawls it. It is the one place in this model where a site is declared to a search engine instead of being discovered by one, which is why it is held as an object of its own rather than as a flag on the site.

It carries no numbers. Impressions, clicks and positions are read through this property and are kept in Search Performance; what lives here is the registration itself — which site, whether the claim was confirmed, and when. Search Console is also where searching done by AI is fairly visible, as very long queries a normal person would never write.

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Initiate Index

The moment a site or one of its pages enters the queue to be indexed. The name is the one coined on the call this model was drawn from rather than a phrase used elsewhere in the trade.

A run arrives here by one of three routes. A site can be entered into Google's Search Console directly, as a claim of ownership and a request that it be crawled. A sitemap can offer the structured list of pages to be indexed. Or a crawler already working somewhere else can find a link to a page it did not know, and go and crawl that page. The sitemap route is optional: a sitemap helps, but if there is none, Google will crawl the site anyway, as long as the robots.txt is in order.

The date here is when the asking happened, not when a robot turned up, and the gap to the fetches that followed is what shows how long a site waited.

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Keyword

A term the practice targets — the middle of the three levels this model keeps for demand. It is one of the main terms of the trade. A keyword is, to a considerable extent, a synonym of a topic: many keywords can be one and the same context, and the practice works on the topic rather than on each phrasing separately.

The word carries two meanings in everyday use, and this model splits them. Asked directly whether the thing a user sees is a keyword or a search query, the answer on the record was: it is a search query. So the string somebody typed is a Search Query, and keyword is used here by this model's own convention for the term the practice targets — the entry on the practice's list, not the entry in somebody's search box. Holding the two apart is what makes it possible to ask which of the chosen terms nobody searches, and which searches a site picks up that it never aimed at.

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Knowledge Gain

Whether a piece of content brings new knowledge into a topic — a super-important component of ranking. Google holds patented technology for the judgement, published information rather than a secret, by which it assesses how valuable a page is in bringing new knowledge into a context. It is kept as an object of its own rather than as a column on the content because there is a context, there is content other sites have already written on that context, and what is being measured is the difference a page makes to it.

It is the brick people fail to understand when they hand content creation over to AI and are then surprised at how their site is doing. The term is not much circulated, and it stays uncirculated because it gets in the way of selling AI content generators. It is not a verdict on the author: content that merely retells what is already available carries no gain, and content built on data nobody else holds carries it whether or not a machine wrote the words.

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Page

One page of the site being optimised: the unit that gets crawled, indexed, ranked and arrived at. A page is what content sits on, and the level at which what a site asks a search engine for — index this — can be compared with what happened to it. is_in_sitemap is a column here and not a link to the page list: the list is optional, and being named in it is simply true or false about a page.

It carries its own behaviour numbers because Google reads user signals per page and for the site as a whole, as an average. A hack turns on that arithmetic: removing content that does not work lifts the averages of what is left, which Google reads as an improvement in quality. Whether a dead page should be removed, redirected or rewritten is not settled, and depends heavily on how spoilt Google is for content on that topic: where it has plenty, such pages should not be on the site at all; where it has little, it will show even weak ones for want of anything better. Pages kept for regulatory or documentation reasons can be held quite safely.

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robots.txt

The file a site publishes to tell arriving search robots where they may go and where they may not, and which of them the owner wants indexed at all. It is its own object rather than a field on the site because it decides what everything downstream is even allowed to see.

A site that publishes no sitemap is still crawled, as long as its robots.txt is in order. A path closed here is a path the crawler does not fetch, whatever the page behind it says about wanting to be indexed — which is why the rules and the pages are worth reading together rather than separately. The count of closed paths says nothing on its own about whether the closures are right: a site that deliberately keeps part of itself out of the index has a high count and a sound setup, and a site that has closed a content directory by mistake looks identical from here.

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Search Performance

Where one page stood for one query on one day, and what that standing earned. A page can hold quite different positions for two queries on the same day, so the key is all three.

The distinction this model turns on lives here: a position is not traffic. Coming from nowhere into the top 20 is a very noticeable result, and there is no traffic yet. Getting from the top 20 into the top five is another three or four months of work: 90% of traffic is concentrated in Google's first five lines, because people do not scroll down when the first five answer them. Searches made by AI land here beside the ones people typed, and a position averaged over both puts the two kinds into one figure.

Because every row is dated, the two clocks of SEO can be told apart here. Work done fundamentally — strong content, good links, and no competitor whose own work starts pushing a site off the top places — can stay stable for as much as five years. A hack can be closed off by an algorithm update, after which it stops giving what it was giving.

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Search Query

What somebody actually put into a search box. It is the finest of the three levels this model keeps for demand: a query is the string that was typed, a keyword is — by this model's own convention — the term the practice targets, and a context is the topic both of them sit in.

The level is where ranking is settled: a position is a position for a query. In the practitioner's own picture of it, for a given query a site was not taking part in the lottery at all, and now it is in it and holding a place.

The boundary between a query and a keyword has blurred a little. A search made by AI is, as a rule, not a keyword but a pile of key words — a very long string a normal person would never write — and those searches land in this mart next to the short ones a person typed.

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sitemap.xml

The structured list of its own pages a site hands to search engines for indexing. It is the site saying, in one place, what it consists of — which is help a crawler can use, but not help it depends on: removing the sitemap does not worsen a site's results in search, as long as everything else is in order.

A site may publish none at all, and the absence is a legitimate state rather than a gap in the data, which is why the list is held separately rather than folded into the site record. Where a sitemap does exist, the number it carries is a claim about what the site contains, and a claim that has drifted away from the pages actually published is worth knowing about. Publishing content and telling search engines about it are two separate acts, and the gap between them is visible here.

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Third Party Websites

The sites a practice does not own: the hosts that link to it, mention it, or could. Off-site work is the third pillar of search — what the rest of the web says about a business.

It deliberately carries no single standing for the site: standing combines the organic traffic a host already has with the links pointing at it within a topic, so it is measured per site and per topic and kept on its own object. What lives here is what is true of the host whatever the topic — its traffic, and whether it is one of the broadly authoritative sites, Forbes and Wikipedia, where being mentioned in any context counts heavily in a site's favour.

Two things have made this work much more complicated than it used to be. Buying links by the hundred used to be the whole game, and that is no longer how it works; reputation and topical relevance are what count now. And AI does not crawl sites, at least not yet: what it responds to is a brand being mentioned in a context, and, judging by indirect signals, the reputation of the source matters a great deal.

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Visit

Somebody — or something — arriving on one of a site's pages. This is the event the whole model points at: most practitioners do treat the visit as their target event, and it is where this model stops. What happens past the arrival belongs to a different model.

There is no key from a visit to the query that produced it, and that is deliberate rather than missing. What an arrival brings with it is how it arrived — the channel and the source — and not the words somebody typed to get there. Demand and behaviour therefore meet in the daily aggregate in Search Performance, which is keyed by query and page, and nowhere else.

A visit is also the raw material of the user signals that decide whether a position survives: of the sites somebody opens for one query, the one they spent three minutes on and the one they left at once are read differently, and the one they left at once is thrown out of the top five so the next site can have its chance.

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Website

The site being optimised — the object the whole technical side of search work is done to, and the boundary between what is within a practice's control and what is not. Content is placed on it, and its crawl rules and page list belong to it; the part of SEO that concerns a site's own condition ends where this record ends.

Google sees how people behaved after arriving, and it looks at those user signals both per page and for the site overall, as an average — so speed, layout and the behaviour numbers are properties of the site rather than of any one page. A site need not be superfast, but it does have to be reasonably fast, and 80% of its traffic may be coming from phones while its layout breaks on them. The two connect: a visitor who opens the site on a phone and leaves at once, because the content they came for could not be read, earns the site a minus for user signals, and the site slides down in search.

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