SEO Jargon Defined
If this glossary of Search Engine Optimization and web development jargon looks familiar it may be because I previously posted many of these definitions on the SEOmoz user generated blog where it was promoted to the main blog. I’ve also continuously hosted it on my own blog so that I can continue to update the list as I run across new slang to define. I heartily invite any and all to give me your input and opinions. If you suggest, correct, or define a term that I see fit to include I will gladly give you credit and a dofollow link.
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-K-L-M-N-O-P-R-S-T-U-W
301 - a permanent server redirect - a change of address for a web page found in the htaccess file on apache servers. Also useful for dealing with canonical issues.
A - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
absolute reference - a URL contained in a link which consists of the entire web address of the resource - as opposed to a relative reference which only contains a partial address for files located in the same current directory or domain. For example http://www.somesite.com/resource.htm is an absolute reference while /resource.htm would be a relative reference from another file in the same directory/folder.
adsense - Google Pay Per Click contextual advertisement program, very common method of basic website monetization.
adsense arbitrage - the practice of taking advantage of the price differential between related keyword markets in Pay Per Click advertising. For example you bid on a keyword in Adwords, then when a user clicks on your ad they are taken to a landing page that is crafted to display related Adsense ads which pay more on average than the cost of the Adwords spend. Like currency arbitrage, this is risky business.
adwords - Google Pay Per Click contextual advertisement program, very common method of basic internet / search engine advertisement.
adwords site - (MFA) made For Google Adsense Advertisements - websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for GA advertisements. This is usually, but not always a bad thing. TV programming is usually Made For Advertisement.
affiliate - an affiliate site markets products or services that are actually sold by another website or business in exchange for fees or commissions.
algorithm - (algo) - a program used by search engines to determine what pages to suggest for a given search query.
alt text - a description of a graphic, which usually isn’t displayed to the end user, unless the graphic is undeliverable, or a browser is used that doesn’t display graphics. Alt text is important because search engines can’t tell one picture from another. Alt text is the one place where it is acceptable for the spider to get different content than the human user, but only because the alt text is accessible to the user, and when properly used is an accurate description of the associated picture. Special web browsers for visually challenged people rely on the alt text to make the content of graphics accessible to the users.
analytics - a program which assists in gathering and analyzing data about website usage. Google analytics is a feature rich, popular, free analytics program.
anchor text - the user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and of the link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.
astroturfing - the opposite of full disclosure, attempting to advance a commercial or political agenda while pretending to be an impartial grassroots participant in a social group. Participating in a user forum with the secret purpose of branding, customer recruitment, or public relations.
authority - (trust) the amount of trust that a site is credited with for a particular search query. Authority/trust is derived from links from other trusted sites, domain age, regular linking and traffic patterns, abstaining from bad behavior, and general good behavior.
authority site - a website which has many incoming links from other related expert/hub sites. Because of this simultaneous citation from trusted hubs an authority site usually has high trust, pagerank, and search results placement. Wikipedia, is an example of an authority site.
B - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
B2B - acronym for Business to Business.
B2C - acronym for Business to Consumer
back link - inlink, incoming link, Any link into a page or site from any other page or site.
black hat - search engine optimization tactics that are counter to best practices such as the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
blog - a website which presents content in a more or less chronological series. Content may or may not be time sensitive. Most blogs us a Content Management System such as WordPress rather than individually crafted WebPages. Because of this, the Blogger can chose to concentrate on content creation instead of arcane code.
blog tag - a game where one blogger creates a post and then specifically challenges 3 other bloggers to post on the same subject (and link back) and then to each pass the challenge on to 3 more bloggers. Very like a chain letter that passes link love instead of money or luck. Of course to bloggers link love = money = luck. Bog tag is one way to rapidly spread a meme.bot - robot, spider, crawler, A program which performs a task more or less autonomously. Search engines use bots to find and add web pages to their search indexes. Spammers often use bots to “scrape” content for the purpose of plagiarizing it for exploitation by the Spammer.
bounce rate - the percentage of users who enter a site and then leave it without viewing any other pages.
bread crumbs - web site navigation in a horizontal bar above the main content which helps the user to understand where they are on the site and how to get back to the root areas.
C - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
canonical issues - duplicate content, canon = legitimate or official version - It is often nearly impossible to avoid duplicate content, especially with CMSs like Wordpress, but also due to the fact that www.site.com, site.com, and www.site.com/index.htm are supposedly seen as dupes by the SEs - although it’s a bit hard to believe they aren’t more sophisticated than that. However these issues can be dealt with effectively in several ways including - using the noindex meta tag in the non-canonical copies, and 301 server redirects to the canon.
click fraud - improper clicks on a PPC advertisement usually by the publisher or his minions for the purpose of undeserved profit. Click fraud is a huge issue for add agencies like Google, because it lowers advertiser confidence that they will get fair value for their add spend.
cloak - the practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. When used to deceive This Black Hat tactic is frowned upon by the search engines and caries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.
CMS - content Management System - Programs such as Wordpress, which separate most of the mundane Webmaster tasks from content creation so that a publisher can be effective without acquiring or even understanding sophisticated coding skills if they so chose.
code swapping - bait and switch, Changing the content after high rankings are achieved.
comment spam - posting blog comments for the purpose of generating an inlink to another site. The reason many blogs use link condoms.
content - text, copy, The part of a web page that is intended to have value for and be of interest to the user. Advertising, navigation, branding and boilerplate are not usually considered to be content.
contextual advertisement - advertising which is related to the content.
conversion - goal, Achievement of a quantifiable goal on a website. Add clicks, sign ups, and sales are examples of conversions.
conversion rate - percentage of users who convert - see conversion.
CPA - acronym for Cost Per Acquisition - the expense involved in acquiring a new customer. For example if a $100 add spend resulted in 100 new customers to your website (or other business) then your CPA would be one dollar. CPA is the cost just to get customers into the store. Conversion to a sale or other goal is another story.
CPC Cost Per Click - the rate that is paid per click for a Pay Per Click Advertiser
CPM - acronym for Cost Per Thousand impressions, A statistical metric used to quantify the average value / cost of Pay Per Click advertisements. M - from the Roman numeral for one thousand.
crawler - bot, spider, A program which moves through the worldwide web or a website by way of the link structure to gather data.
D - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
directory - a site devoted to directory pages. The Yahoo directory is an example.
directory page - a page of links to related WebPages.
dofollow - do follow, slang for a link that is not prevented from passing PageRank by a nofollow directive or other link condom.
doorway - gateway, A web page that is designed specifically to attract traffic from a search engine. A doorway page which redirects users (but not spiders) to another site or page is implementing cloaking. - Previous Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
duplicate content - obviously content which is similar or identical to that found on another website or page. A site may not be penalized for serving duplicate content but it may receive little if any Trust from the search engines compared to the content that the SE considers being the original. Alternatively PageRank my be split between the copies.
E - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
e commerce site - a website devoted to retail sales.
F - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
feed - content which is delivered to the user via special websites or programs such as news aggregators.
FFA - acronym for Free For All - A page or site with many outgoing links to unrelated websites, containing little if any unique content. Link farms are only intended for spiders, and have little if any value to human users, and thus are ignored or penalized by the search engines.
frames - a web page design where two or more documents appear on the same screen, each within it’s own frame. Frames are bad for SEO because spiders sometimes fail to correctly navigate them. Additionally, most users dislike frames because it is almost like having two tiny monitors neither of which shows a full page of information at one time.
funnel process - usually a series of web pages which are all part of the process to complete a sale or other conversion. On a shopping cart site the funnel process may include cart contents page, checkout pages, and a final transaction submission. Retailers monitor the activity on these pages to analyze why customers might exit without completing the sale.
G - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
gateway page - doorway page, A web page that is designed to attract traffic from a search engine and then redirect it to another site or page. A doorway page is not exactly the same as cloaking but the effect is the same in that users and search engines are served different content.
gadget - gizmo, widget, small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter or IP address display. Gizmos can make good link bait.
gizmo - gadget, widget, small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter or IP address display. Gizmos can make good link bait.
Google bomb - the combined effort of multiple webmasters to change the Google search results usually for humorous effect. The “miserable failure” - George Bush, and “greatest living American” - Steven Colbert Google bombs are famous examples. Google claims to have defused Google bombs.
Google bowling - maliciously trying to lower a sites rank by sending it links from the “bad neighborhood” - Kind of like yelling “Good luck with that infection!” to your buddy as you get off the school bus - there is some controversy as to if this works or is just an SEO urban myth.
Google dance - the change in SERPs caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The cause of great angst and consternation for webmasters who slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.
Google juice - trust, authority, pagerank, trust / authority from Google, which flows through outgoing links to other pages.
Googlebot - google’s spider program
GYM - acronym for Google - Yahoo - Microsoft, the big three of search
H - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
hand penalty - being singled out and manually devalued or deleted from SERPs, as opposed to an algorithmic penalty that would automatically be applied to all pages which satisfy certain conditions. Hand penalties are apparently a last resort for incorrigible websites as far as Google is concerned - using the algorithm seems to be preferred. Sometimes referred to as a hand job.
hit - once the standard by which web traffic was often judged, but now a largely meaningless term replaced by pageviews AKA impressions. A hit happens each time that a server sends an object - documents, graphics, include files, etc. Thus one pageview could generate many hits.
host - hosting service, web host, the physical location and network structure where internet files actually exist. A server, network connection, along with software and services. Hosting services are usually outsourced to specialized companies which may be located anywhere relative to the entity which manages the content of a website.
hotlink - The practice of using images on one site that are actually hosted on another. A hotlink uses the storage and bandwidth of the image hosting site while giving a bit of link love to it. The image owner may benefit as long as it doesn’t cause bandwidth or storage issues.
hub - expert page, a trusted page with high quality content that links out to related pages.
HTML - acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language, directives or “markup” which are used to add formatting and web functionality to plain text for use on the internet. HTML is the mother tongue of the search engines, and should generally be strictly and exclusively adhered to on web pages.
I - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
impression - page view, The event where a user views a webpage one time.
in bound link - inlink, incoming link Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.
index - noun, a database of WebPages and their content used by the search engines.
index -verb, to add a web page to a search engine index.
indexed pages - the pages on a site which have been indexed.
inlink - incoming link, inbound link, Inbound links from related pages are the source of trust and pagerank.
K - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
keyword - key phrase - the word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine.
keyword cannibalization - the excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. This practice makes it difficult for the users and the search engines to determine which page is most relevant for the keyword.
keyword density - the percentage of words on a web page which are a particular keyword. If this value is unnaturally high the page may be penalized.
keyword research - the hard work of determining which keywords are appropriate for targeting.
keyword spam - keyword stuffing, Inappropriately high keyword density.
keyword stuffing - keyword spam, Inappropriately high keyword density.
L - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
landing page - the page that a user lands on when they click on a link in a SERP. A landing page may be specially designed to begin a conversion process.
latent semantic indexing - aka LSI, a concept that you see mentioned in SEO circles but is probably largely irrelevant for practical purposes, because it most likely can’t be “optimized” for. Anyway, here is the best definition that I can find - ” (LSI) is one of the most sophisticated modern attempts at high quality automatic indexing. It is based on co-occurrence clustering of terms and the identification of documents associated with these term clusters. By relying on co-occurrence data, LSI is also able to deal with the problem of the variety of terms that can be used to express similar concepts. For example, both lawyers and attorneys are likely to belong to the same cluster with related terms such as courts, trials, judges, sentencing, etc.” - In other words, a query for “trial lawyers” could conceivably return a result which contains neither word in the query, or their synonyms, but rather related terms determined to be relevant by LSI - Information Retrieval Design, a book by James D. Anderson - Professor Emeritus of Library & Information Science and Jose Perez-Carballo - associate professor Department of Information Systems College of Business and Economics California State University - LA
link - an element on a web page that can be clicked on to cause the browser to jump to another page or another part of the current page.
link bait - a webpage with the designed purpose of attracting incoming links, often mostly via social media.
link building - actively cultivating incoming links to a site.
link condom - any of several methods used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible detrimental results of indorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage link spam in user generated content. Google insists that advertisements be link condomed (nofollowed) to prevent the practice of passing pagerank for pay - at a penalty of having your own pagerank lowered by apparent hand edit. Thus the pagerank smackdown of late October 2007.
linkerati - internet users who are the most productive targets of linkbait. The Linkerati includes - social taggers, forum posters, resource maintainers, bloggers and other content creators, etc - who are most likely to create incoming links or link generating traffic (in the case of social networkers). Suggested by lorisa.
link exchange - a reciprocal linking scheme often facilitated by a site devoted to directory pages. Link exchanges usually allow links to sites of low or no quality, and add no value themselves. Quality directories are usually human edited for quality assurance.
link farm - a group of sites which all link to each other.- Previous Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
link juice - aka PageRank, The value which according to the pagerank formula is passed from one site to another via links. Links with relevant anchor text from a strong relevant page which is on a strong relevant domain would in theory pass more value than links from a weak irrelevant page on a weak irrelevant domain.
link love - an outgoing link, which passes trust, unencumbered by any kind of link condom.
link partner - link exchange, reciprocal linking, Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually don’t see these as high value links, because of the reciprocal nature. However reciprocal links can be much more valuable if 1) The links aren’t on “link pages” but rather on content pages 2) The targets of the links are content pages which are relevant to the linking pages and the anchor text of the links. - even thought this may still constitute reciprocal linking it serves a purpose to the users and the relevance of the different elements looks better to the SE algorithms.
link popularity - a measure of the value of a site based upon the number and quality of sites that link to it
link spam - aka Comment Spam, Unwanted links such as those posted in user generated content like blog comments.
link text - aka Anchor text, The user visible text of a link. Search engines use anchor text to indicate the relevancy of the referring site and link to the content on the landing page. Ideally all three will share some keywords in common.
long tail - longer more specific search queries that are often less targeted than shorter broad queries. For example a search for “widgets” might be very broad while “red widgets with reverse threads” would be a long tail search. A large percentage of all searches are long tail searches/
LSI - acronym for Latent Semantic Indexing, a concept that you see mentioned in SEO circles but is probably largely irrelevant for practical purposes, because it most likely can’t be “optimized” for. Anyway, here is the best definition that I can find - ” (LSI) is one of the most sophisticated modern attempts at high quality automatic indexing. It is based on co-occurrence clustering of terms and the identification of documents associated with these term clusters. By relying on co-occurrence data, LSI is also able to deal with the problem of the variety of terms that can be used to express similar concepts. For example, both lawyers and attorneys are likely to belong to the same cluster with related terms such as courts, trials, judges, sentencing, etc.” - In other words, a query for “trial lawyers” could conceivably return a result which contains neither word in the query, or their synonyms, but rather related terms determined to be relevant by LSI - Information Retrieval Design, a book by James D. Anderson - Professor Emeritus of Library & Information Science and Jose Perez-Carballo - associate professor Department of Information Systems College of Business and Economics California State University - LA
M - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
mashup - a web page which consists primarily of single purpose software and other small programs (gizmos and gadgets) or possibly links to such programs. Mashups are quick and easy content to produce and are often popular with users, and can make good link bait. Tool collection pages are sometimes mashups.
meme - an Idea which spreads rapidly from blog to blog. Blog tag is one way of rapidly spreading a meme.
metablog - a blog about blogging. The subject of a metablog can be any aspect of blogging or web development related to blogging - SEO, writing, marketing, etc.
META tags - statements within the HEAD section of an HTML page which contain information about the page. META information may be in the SERPs but is not visible on the page. It is especially important to have unique and accurate META title and description tags, because the title tag is one of the factors that the search engines rely upon the most to determine what the page is about, and along with the description tag is the first impression that users get about your page within the SERPs.
metric - a standard of measurement used by analytics programs.
MFA - made For Advertisements - websites that are designed from the ground up as a venue for advertisements. This is usually, but not always a bad thing. TV programming is usually MFA.
mirror site - an identical site at a different address.
monetize - to extract income from a site. Adsense ads are an easy way to Monetize a website.
N - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
natural search results - the search engine results which are not sponsored, or paid for in any way.
nofollow - a command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not follow either any links on the page or the specific link. A form of link condom.
noindex - a command found in either the HEAD section of a web page or within individual link code, which instructs robots to not index the page or the specific link. A form of link condom.
non reciprocal link - if site A links to site B, but site B does not link back to site A, then the link is considered non reciprocal. Search engines tend to give more value to non-reciprocal links than to reciprocal ones because they are less likely to be the result of collusion between sites.
O - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
on page SEO factors - a web page can be “optimized” for a keyword by placing your keyword in important locations on the page:
- In the page URL
- Once or twice in the title metatag
- In the description metatag - Word on the street is that the engines don’t consider the meta descrition, but since it effects click through rate from the SERP (the goal is to get people on your site isn’t it?) I say that it is an SEO factor.
- In the keywords metatag - Google doesn’t take this into account, but the other guys do, so why not include it?
- In an H1 heading near the top of the page
- 3 or more times in the content text
- At least once in bold
- NOT in the anchor text of outgoing links
organic link - organic links are those that are published only because the webmaster considers them to add value for users.
P - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
PageRank - aka PR, a value between 0 and 1 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies link popularity and trust among other (proprietary) factors. Often confused with Toolbar Pagerank. - Previous Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
pagerank smackdown - the event of late October 2007 when Google lowered the toolbar pagerank of many prominent websites - apparently for engaging in buying or selling links.
pay for inclusion - aka PFI, The practice of charging a fee to include a website in a search engine or directory. While quite common, usually what is technically paid for is more rapid consideration to avoid Googles prohibition on paid links.
pingback - a feature of WordPress which lets you automatically notify the author of an article if you link to his article (article on a blog, of course). If the links you include in an article you write on a blog lead to a blog which is pingback-enabled, then the author of that blog gets a notification in the form of a pingback that you linked to his article. Pingbacks are often included in the comment section of the target article and surrounded by square brackets - [ ].
portal - a web service which offers a wide array of features to entice users to make the portal their “home page” on the web. IGoogle, Yahoo, and MSN are portals.
PPA - acronym for Pay Per Action, Very similar to Pay Per Click except publishers only get paid when click throughs result in conversions.
PPC - acronym for Pay Per Click, a contextual advertisement scheme where advertisers pay add agencies (such as Google) whenever a user clicks on their add. Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.
proprietary method - bullshit, snake oil, sales term often used by (often disreputable) SEO service providers to imply that they can do something unique to achieve “Top Ten Rankings”.
pseudo static page - many Content Management Systems - WordPress for example - use a server side program such as PHP to assemble documents from information contained in a database such as MySQL. So the documents as a whole only exist in the users’ web browser. “Static pages” are often single plain, non dynamic HTML documents, and can even be unformatted text documents.
R - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
reciprocal link - link exchange, reciprocal linking) Two sites which link to each other. Search engines usually don’t see these as high value links, because of the reciprocal nature. However reciprocal links can be much more valuable if 1) The links aren’t on “link pages” but rather on content pages 2) The targets of the links are content pages which are relevant to the linking pages and the anchor text of the links. - even thought this may still constitute reciprocal linking it serves a purpose to the users and the relevance of the different elements looks better to the SE algorithms.
redirect - any of several methods used to change the address of a landing page such as when a site is moved to a new domain, or in the case of a doorway.
regional long tail - aka RLT coined by Chris Paston of onlinedevelopment.co.uk - a multi word keyword term which contains a city or region name. Especially useful for the service industry.
relative reference - a URL contained in a link which consists of less than the entire web address of the resource which is located on the same site as the link - as opposed to an absolute reference which contains the complete web address of a resource. For example http://www.somesite.com/resource.htm is an absolute reference while /resource.htm would be a relative reference from another file in the same directory/folder.
RLT - acronym for Regional Long Tail
robots.txt - a file in the root directory of a website use to restrict and control the behavior of search engine spiders.
ROI - acronym for Return On Investment, One use of analytics software is to analyze and quantify return on investment, and thus cost / benefit of different schemes.
S - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
sandbox - there has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a “sandbox,” preventing them from ranking well for anything until a set period of time has passed. The existence or exact behavior of the sandbox is not universally accepted among SEOs, but the consensus seems to be that an older domain is better than a new one.
scrape - copying content from a site, often facilitated by automated bots. - Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
SE - acronym for Search Engine.
search engine - aka SE, a program, which searches a document or group of documents for relevant matches of a users keyword phrase and returns a list of the most relevant matches. Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo search the entire internet for relevant matches.
search engine spam - pages created to cause search engines to deliver inappropriate or less relevant results. Search Engine Optimizers are sometimes unfairly perceived as search engine Spammers. Of course in some cases they actually are.
SEM - short for search engine marketing, SEM is often used to describe acts associated with researching, submitting and positioning a Web site within search engines to achieve maximum exposure of your Web site. SEM includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services and functions that will increase exposure and traffic to your Web site.
SEO - short for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the number of visitors to a Web site by achieving high rank in the organic search results of search engined by using techniques like on page optimization, internal site links, and cultivation of inlinks from other sites. The higher a Web site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that users will visit the site. It is common practice for Internet users to not click past the first few pages of search results, therefore high rank in SERPs is essential for obtaining traffic for a site. SEO helps to ensure that a site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be indexed and favorably ranked by the search engine.
SERP - acronym for Search Engine Results Page.
siloing - pagerank sculpting, Concentrating the flow of pagerank (aka linkjuice) to important landing pages by nofollowing links to less important pages. There is some controversy about the effectiveness of this technique.
site map - a page or structured group of pages which link to every user accessible page on a website, and hopefully improves site usability by clarifying the data structure of the site for the users. An XML sitemap is often kept in the root directory of a site just to help search engine spiders to find all of the site pages.
SMWC - acronym for Slapping Myself With Celery, indicates an extreme reaction similar to a “spit take” but more vegan-trendy. Often combined with other exclamatory acronyms. - WTF/SMWC, or perhaps ROTFL/SMWC.
SMM - acronym for Social Media Marketing, Website or brand promotion through social media
SMP - acronym for Social Media Poisoning, A term coined by Rand Fishkin - any of several (possibly illegal) black hat techniques designed to implicate a competitor as a spammer - For example, blog comment spamming in the name / brand of a competitor
sock puppet - an online identity used to either hide a persons real identity or to establish multiple user profiles.
social bookmark - a form of Social Media where users bookmarks are aggregated for public access.
social media - various online technologies used by people to share information and perspectives. Blogs, wikis, forums, social bookmarking, user reviews and rating sites (digg, reddit) are all examples of Social Media.
social media marketing - aka SMM, Website or brand promotion through social media
social media poisoning - aka SMP, A term coined by Rand Fishkin - any of several (possibly illegal) black hat techniques designed to implicate a competitor as a spammer - For example blog comment spamming in the name / brand of a competitor
spam ad page - aka SpamAd page, A Made For Adsense/Advertisement page which uses scraped or machine generated text for content, and has no real value to users other than the slight value of the adds. Spammers sometimes create sites with hundreds of these pages.
spamdexing - search engine spamming is the practice of deceptively modifying web pages to increase the chance of them being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner.
spammer - a person who uses spam to pursue a goal - usually to make money.
spider - bot, crawler, A specialized bot program used by search engines to find and add web pages to their indexes.
spider trap - an endless loop of automatically generated links which can “trap” a spider program. Sometimes intentionally used to prevent automated scraping or e-mail address harvesting.
splash page - often animated, graphics pages without significant textual content. Splash pages are intended to look flashy to humans, but without attention to SEO may look like dead ends to search engine spiders, which can only navigate through text links. Poorly executed splash pages may be bad for SEO and often a pain in the ass for users. - Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
splog - spam Blog which usually contains little if any value to humans, and is often machine generated or made up of scraped content.
SSL - is a common “public key / private key” encryption scheme used by many online retail and banking sites to protect the financial integrity of transactions. When an SSL session begins – usually on the https protocol, the server sends its public key to the browser. The browser then sends a randomly generated private key back to the server in order to have a secret key exchange for that session. A new key is generated for each session to further enhance security.
static page - a web page without dynamic content or variables such as session IDs in the URL. Static pages are good for SEO work in that they are friendly to search engine spiders.
stickiness - mitigation of bounce rate. Website changes that entice users to stay on or return to the site longer, and view more pages improve the sites “stickiness”.
submission - notifying a search engine about the existance of a web site.
supplemental index - supplemental results, Pages with very low pagerank, which are still relevant to a search query, often appear in the SERPs with a label of Supplemental Result. Googles representative’s say that this is not indicative of a penalty, only low pagerank. - Previous Definition revised based upon advice from Michael Martinez
T - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
text link - a plain HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code such as flash or java script.
time on page - the amount of time that a user spends on one page before clicking off. An indication of quality and relevance.
TLD - acronym for Top Level Domain, the highest level of the hierarchy of internet domains. .com .net and .org are examples of Top Level Domains.
toolbar pagerank - aka PR, a value between 0 and 10 assigned by the Google algorithm, which quantifies page importance and is not the same as pagerank. Toolbar Pagerank is only updated a few times a year, and is not a reliable indicator of current status. Often confused with Pagerank. - Definition added based upon advice from Michael Martine. You can find out more about the schedule of updates for TBPR here.
trackback - an way for one blog site to notify another about a citation. In the case of two WordPress blogs with trackbacks enabled - Blogger A writes a post which includes a citation to an article on Blog B and a trackback, Blog A’s WordPress software automatically sends a trackback to Blog B which then appears in the comments of the cited article as a link to Blog A and a snippet from the article. This serves to notify Blogger B that Blogger A has joined the conversation, and has included a reference to his/her article. Both blogs benefit from the link love and the citations that send traffic between the (usually somehow related) blogs.
trust rank - a method of differentiating between valuable pages and spam by quantifying link relationships from trusted human evaluated seed pages.
U - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
URL - acronym for Uniform Resource Locator - AKA Web Address
user generated content - aka UGC, Social Media, wikis, Folksonomies, and some blogs rely heavily on User Generated Content. One could say that Google is exploiting the entire web as UGC for an advertising venue.
W - Definitions - back to Top of Glossary
walled garden - a group of pages which link to each other, but are not linked to by any other pages. A walled garden can still be indexed if it is included in a sitemap, but it will probably have very low pagerank.
web 2.0 - is characterized by websites, which encourage user interaction.
white hat - seo techniques, which conform to best practice guidelines, and do not attempt to unscrupulously “game” or manipulate SERPs.
widget - 1) (gadget, gizmo) small applications used on web pages to provide specific functions such as a hit counter or IP address display. These programs can make good link bait. 2) a term borrowed from economics which means “any product or commodity.”
wiki jacking - a malicious (and probably counterproductive) practice whereby you knock an “enemy” out of top serp ranking by using SEO techniques (internal linking esp) to elevate a wikipedia listing to the #1 position. Term coined by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.
