About GrowthPedia

GrowthPedia is 648 plain-language entries about search engine optimisation, written and paid for by one person. There is no company behind it, no editorial team, and nothing for sale.

Updated: 27 Jul 2026By Vera Lindqvist

Why this exists

I started in SEO in 2014, by accident, as the person at a small online retailer who happened to understand why the product pages were not showing up in Google. That turned into years of doing it properly: three in-house, then freelance, mostly for teams of five to fifty people who had a website, no budget for an agency, and no idea who to trust.

The recurring problem was never the work. It was the reading. Every time someone asked me what crawl budget was, or whether domain authority is real, the first page of Google handed them a tool vendor's blog post. Accurate enough, usually — but written by a company whose revenue depends on you believing that metric matters. The definition was always shaped by what was being sold.

So I kept my own glossary: plain definitions, what the thing actually is, when it matters, when it does not, and what the primary source says. People kept asking for the link. In 2026 I put it on a domain.

That is all this is — the notes I would give a colleague, written down properly, free, with nothing to sell you.

What I earn from this site: nothing

This matters more than it sounds. Almost every SEO resource that ranks is published by someone selling a tool, a course, or an agency retainer, and that shapes which metrics get called important. I would rather you could read a definition here and not have to work out what I want from you.

My biases, so you can discount them

I have paid for Ahrefs and Screaming Frog with my own money for years, and I probably speak about them more warmly than a neutral party would. I have never worked for a tool vendor. If a tool ever pays me anything, that entry gets a banner saying so, or it gets deleted.

I am a practitioner, not a Google engineer. Where something is known only from testing, or only from what Google has said publicly, I say which. Where nobody outside Google actually knows, I say that too — that is the sentence most SEO content refuses to write.

How the entries are made

Every entry follows one structure: a one-sentence definition, key facts, the detail, the mistakes people actually make, real questions, and the sources. Research starts from primary documentation — Google Search Central first — and entries are drafted against that fixed template with editorial tooling, then checked against the sources before publishing. The full process is written down in the editorial policy, including what the tooling does and does not decide.

I would rather be transparent about the method than pretend a one-person reference site of this size was typed by hand. What I will not do is publish a claim I have not checked, or cite a source I have not read.

Who I am

• Name: Vera Lindqvist
• Based: Bristol, United Kingdom. Swedish, moved here in 2017.
• In SEO since: 2014 — in-house, then freelance for small teams.
• Email: vera@growthpedia.org — it is a real inbox and I read it.
• What I am not: an agency, a company, a tool vendor, or a team.

There is no author photo on this site. A stock or AI-generated headshot on a page about trustworthiness is exactly the sort of thing this project exists to argue against, and a reverse image search is one right-click away. If that bothers you, judge the entries instead.

Using this material

The entry text is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 — copy it, translate it, quote it, put it in your team wiki. Attribution and a link is all I ask. The details are in the terms.

If I get something wrong

I will. When it happens, tell me and I will fix it and log it publicly with a date on the corrections page — including what was wrong and for how long. A reference site that hides its errors is not a reference site.