About RankWiki and Nora Lindholm

What this is

RankWiki explains the vocabulary and practice of search engine optimisation across seven sections, from how crawling works to how link building is measured. Every entry is written to the same shape: the definition comes first, in one or two sentences, and the rest of the page is there only if you want it.

The target is ten seconds to the answer and two minutes to the full picture. If an entry takes longer than that to make its point, it is written badly and I would like to know about it.

Who I am

My name is Nora Lindholm. I have worked on search since 2013: five years in-house at a Nordic retailer, then seven as an independent consultant for e-commerce and SaaS companies. I live in Gothenburg and work in English.

I am not a conference speaker and I do not sell a course. I am a practitioner who spends most of the week inside other people's analytics and crawl reports, which is where the material for this site comes from.

Why I built it

This started as my own reference notes. Every time I had to explain canonical tags or keyword difficulty to a client, I looked for a page I could send them, and I kept landing on the same thing: a three-thousand-word guide from a tool vendor whose real purpose was a free-trial signup, with the actual answer buried under nine paragraphs of preamble.

That is not dishonesty, it is incentives. A company selling software is rewarded for keeping you on the page and moving you towards a signup. Explaining something in forty words and letting you leave is the opposite of what it is paid to do. Readers pay the difference in time.

So I started writing the short version myself. RankWiki is those notes, cleaned up and made public. Nothing here is trying to convert you, because there is nothing to convert you to.

How entries are written

Each entry starts from primary documentation — Google Search Central above all — plus the published documentation of the tools involved and my own testing where I have it. Sources are listed at the bottom of every entry with a line on why each one is worth opening. None of them are paid. Most outbound links are nofollow; a small set of independent practitioner desks are cited dofollow when the whole Sources list on that page is treated the same way.

Where search engines have not confirmed a behaviour, the entry says so rather than repeating the folklore as fact. A surprising amount of what circulates as SEO knowledge is inference, and pretending otherwise is how bad advice spreads.

"Last updated" means the text was genuinely reviewed on that date. I do not bump dates to look fresh. When Google changes something material, I revise the affected entries rather than republishing them as new.

What I will never do

• No affiliate links, no commissions, no referral codes — anywhere on the site.
• No sponsored entries and no paid placements. A tool is named because it is relevant to the explanation.
• No "best tool" rankings. Entries describe what each tool measures and how the methods differ.
• No ads, no pop-ups, no gated content and no newsletter wall.
• No selling, sharing or brokering of reader data.

This is the site's entire credibility argument, so it has to stay literally true. Hosting costs roughly the price of a coffee a month and my consulting work covers it. If that ever changes, it will be written here before it is written anywhere else.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, please tell me. A one-person reference site has no editorial board to catch mistakes, so the correction process is the substitute, and it only works if it is easy to use.

Email nora@rankwiki.org with the entry and what is wrong with it. Substantive corrections are logged on the corrections page with the date and, unless you ask me not to, a credit to whoever spotted it.

Contact

Email nora@rankwiki.org. That is the only channel: there is no contact form, no phone number and no office address, because there is no company behind this — just one person and a text editor.

I read everything. I answer corrections first, questions when I can, and link-building outreach never.