Glossary - SEO

Soft-Spy Provides a glossary of terms, abberviations and acronyms used in the Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Industry.

Authority: A document (page) pointed to by several hubs (experts). An authority page is assumed to have a lot of content relevant to a primary topic.

Algorithm - The formula that determines how a web page will rank in the search results pages of a search engine.

ALT text - The text that appears when you put your mouse on top of an image or a picture.

Below the fold - Content of a web page that is not seen by the consumer unless the consumer scrolls down.

Blind Traffic - Low quality traffic generated by misleading banners or SPAM.

Conversion: A conversion is any desired action that is taken as a result of visiting a Web page. Conversions are used in many Web marketing metrics.

Content-rich doorway: A doorway page dressed up with graphics, navigation, and linked to from a site map so that it looks like a normal part of a Web site. The copy is written to rank for a single keyword expression.

Crawl Page: A document consisting of links to other pages, provided for the sole purpose of giving crawlers (robots) links to follow. Spammers used to submit these puppies to the search engines en masse. Maybe they still do.

Clustering - In search engine search results pages, clustering is limiting each represented website to one or two listings.

Doorway / Doorway Page: A document with a small amount of text (usually coherent but sometimes gibberish) intended to rank well specifically for one targeted expression. In the old days, people created as many doorways as they had targeted keywords and search engines to work with.

Expert (page or document): In Jon Kleinberg’s HITS algorithm (as well as the CLEVER, ExpertRank, and Edison algorithms) an expert is a document about a specific topic for which hubs exist, such that the expert document is pointed to by many hubs. Cf. Hub.

Frogblog: Technically, other people coined the expression for blogs devoted to all things French. But I adopted the term to refer to a network of blogs that a spammer (or really active blogger) hops around, posting brief (often useless drivel) entries for the sake of being active. Frogblogs usually have a lot of Javascript ads in the margins. All six margins.

Filter Words - Words such as is, am, were, was, the, for, do, ETC, that search engines deem irrelevant for indexing purposes.

Gizmo: Now often called “widgets” (by mistake, I think, as “widgets” tend to be more under-the-hood type things), gizmos were useful mini-apps or functions used to spiff up otherwise boring pages. Hit counters are gizmos. Event countdown calendars are gizmos. Any Javascript whizbang plug-in for a page is a gizmo.

Hub: A document that links out to many other documents devoted to a single topic. Think of any category page in a major directory like Yahoo! or DMOZ. All the documents linked to are assumed to be authorities (sort of a circular logic). In Jon Kleinberg’s HITS algorithm (as well as the CLEVER, ExpertRank, and Edison algorithms) a hub is a document about a specific topic that links to many experts in the topic. Cf. Expert.

Landing page: A content-rich doorway used to receive PPC traffic. Copy is written for the visitor, not the search engine, making a sales pitch (usually — I’ve seen a few that meandered pointlessly with fake testimonials).

Link baiting: The practice of creating attention-grabbing headlines and seeding links to articles on social media sites for the purpose of generating thousands of links on blogs, forums, and other sites in a very brief period of time. It is assumed that the content is link-worthy, but this is a subjective point.

Link building: A mindless activity that some people mistake for true search engine optimization. (Yes, I build links, too. Now stop feeling insulted. Sheesh!)

Link farm: Any group of Web sites where every member site in the group links to every other member site in the group.

Link flow: An expression used by many people to describe PageRank. In SEO Theory, link flow is the link pathway users and search engines may use to get from one page to another.

Mashup: A page made up from gizmos (or mostly from gizmos). The gizmos could be RSS feeds, Javascript feeds, etc. Any content pushed by free content distribution sites. Google maps is a great gizmo.

MFA: Made-for-advertising page. A broad class of pages,in my opinion, as some of them actually have sensible content (like cheap directories, article abstract pages, article reprint pages, press release reprints, etc.). The real purpose of the pages, of course, is to draw traffic in the hope people will click on the Javascript ads from Yahoo!, Google, or whomever.

Mushblog: An automated blog consisting entirely of randomly generated content, usually in the form of ellipsis (…) impregnated text fragments intended to look like fair use citations. Mushblogs host Javascript ads from Yahoo! and Google. No human fingers touch those posts. Some really cool Mushblogs actually have trails of autogenerated comments (which is the only cool thing about them, in my opinion) on some of the posts.

Search engine optimization (SEO) : The art of designing or modifying Web pages to rank well in search engines. Now mostly superceded by link building and/or link baiting.

Site map: An on-site directory of important (or all) pages. Sitemaps have been divided into XML Sitemaps which are used by search engines and HTML Sitemaps which are used by visitors for quick navigation to deep content.

Signpost page: A goofy advertising page. The entire page might be one advertisement built around a picture of a business or it might be a table filled with small ads from many businesses. Signposts are revenue-generating pages hosted by real Web sites with actual traffic that somehow induce their visitors to browse the signpost pages. Sort of like, “Visit our sponsors because they paid us outrageous fees to put their print-ad style advertisements on one of our Web pages.” A few sites actually consist of nothing but signpost pages, but I don’t see many of them any more. These are not classified ad sites. These are not business directories. They are random collecion of advertisements plastered on Web pages.

SpamAd page: An MFA page, but it’s spammy gibberish. Useless junk that no one in their right mind (and maybe not in their unright mind) would want to read. Just loaded with scraped content and/or gibberish in the hope it ranks well for something and that all visitors will click on the Javascript ads.

Stemming - Word variations. For example, if I entered the query "swim", a search engine that supports stemming might return results that include "swimming" or "swims".

Stop Word - A word which is ignored in a query because the word is so commonly used that it makes no contribution to relevancy. Examples are common net words such as computer and web, and general words like get, I, me, the and you.

TSETSB: Acronym for The search engine that spam built, a pejorative name for Google, which became immensely popular with the SEO community after people realized the link farms they developed for Inktomi worked better on Google. Sometimes revived when people discuss the MFA/SpamAd issues and the click fraud controversy.

USP - Unique Selling Proposition. Sometimes mistakenly defined as Unique Selling Point. The Unique Selling Proposition concept was first developed by Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency. It states that in order for advertising to be effective, it must address three elements:

Advanced SEO Glossary

Clustered Results - noun phrase. You see this most often with Ask, but it happens in Google quite a bit and I think Yahoo! also does it sometimes. You’ll see 2 pages from the same site, the 2nd one indented. Now, Ask likes to put little folders in the margin to show how smart they are about clustering search results from multiple sites under a single topic. But did you know that Google clusters sites and hides them from you? If you change your Google Preferences to show more than ten listings per page, you’ll see the clustered listings. That is why so many data center tools show you different rankings from what you think you’re seeing.

Collapsed Results or Collapsed Listings - noun phrases. Usually what I call Clustered Results when I cannot think of the word “cluster” (which is more often than not). Technically, these expressions should really only refer to the hidden clusters described above.

Filter - noun. A process whereby a Web document is evaluated and either flagged as “spam”, “potential spam”, “adult-oriented content”, “illegal content”, or something else. Each search engine employs multiple filters. Some filters were designed into the algorithms from the start. Some filters have been added as afterthoughts as search engines have had to react to manipulative or otherwise previously undetected inappropriate content.

Filthy Linking Rich Principle: The more links a document has accrued, the more links the document will accrue. Stated another way, the more visible a document is in search engine results, the more likely the document is to accrue links, and hence the more visible the document becomes in search engine results.

First Visibility Principle: The first document to cross the Idiot threshold (q.v.) becomes the first authority on the topic.

Fuzzy point: The approximate state of knowledge where the information about a document’s indexing status and information about the number of queries to which the document is relevant are approximately equal.

Host - noun. A much-used term in academic search engineering literature to distinguish between “Web document collections” on a systemic level. A host is not necessarily the same as a site. Hosts are generally defined to be either entire domains (example.com) or sub-domains (sub1.example.com). A domain to which one or more sub-domains belong would be treated as multiple individual hosts, distinct from one another. A host is easier to identify than a Web site, which may be only a part of a host’s content.

Idiot threshold: A figurative status at which a document has accrued enough meaningless links through word-of-mouth that the document assumes the status of being an authority on a topic.

Index - noun. The database(s) against which queries are resolved. All of the major search engines maintain multiple indexes. Each is a separate, distinct database, either physically (kept in separate files) or virtually (logically segmented portions of a master database). The expression database is probably inappropriate for describing what the search engines maintain. When you see me refer to Main Index, think of that as the “static Web page index”. Other indexes may include Image Indexes, News Indexes, and Blog Indexes. I have some ideas on how these various indexes are built, but I don’t expect to share them on this blog.

Index - verb. The process of adding information about Web content to a search engine’s database about the Web. The indexing process may entail considerable effort depending upon the complexity and applicability of the document.

Indexer - noun. A type of program that search engines use to update their databases with information about retrieved and parsed Web documents. You rarely see even knowledgeable SEO forum moderators and admins speak of indexers and parsers, perhaps out of a misguided concern that they will confuse people who are new to search engine optimization. Unfortunately, those new people visit the forums to learn about SEO, so teaching them the wrong terminology does them a great disservice.

Internal Links or Internal Linkage - noun phrase. These are the links within your own site that point to other pages in your site. Search engines may use a different, host-level definition for internal links. It is possible that all the major search engines now distinguish between host-internal and host-external links. See host for more information.

Internal PageRank - noun phrase. This is the actual static value that Google computes and adds to dynamic (run-time, query-time) relevance scores to determine search results rankings. Matt Cutts distinguished between Internal PageRank and Toolbar PageRank on his blog. He also confirmed that he was talking about Internal PageRank where I cited him in my PageRank: Where it helps, where it doesn’t help, and other facts post at Spider-Food in July 2006. Most SEO forum moderators and admins appear to be speaking about Internal PageRank when they discuss PageRank at all, except where they qualify their remarks to address the Toolbar PR value (that nearly all moderators and admins now tell people to ignore). The Toolbar PR value is a proxy value and it is only published 3-4 times a year, making it a virtually worthless indicator of quality or value.

Link mass: The combination of all connected links that lead to any given page in a hypertext document collection. Absolute link mass cannot be measured. Relative link mass can be approximately measured.

Link pathway: Two or more pages connected as in a chain (a “path”) by hypertext links.

Link pathway segment: A segment or portion of a larger link pathway at least 1 document long and at least 2 documents shorter than the link pathway (the beginning and terminating documents in the link pathway cannot be in the link pathway segment).

Link Trap: Similar to a link bait page, a link trap is usually built by cheaters in reciprocal linking schemes where the outbound links are designed not to pass value.

PageRank Trap: A specialized form of link bait, a PageRank trap is a page whose outbound links only point to other pages on the same domain or site. Usually an article or forum discussion thread that attracts links from other sites.

Preservation, or Preservation Principle: The belief that a Web site can retain all or most of its PageRank by “hoarding” or “sculpting” PageRank. The Preservation Principle is an SEO myth.

Parser - noun. A type of program used by search engines to break down your HTML pages into components for indexing. The parser strips your indexable content and passes it to one or more indexers. Many SEO forum moderators and admins who should know better continue to speak of “spiders” doing the parsing and indexing. Spiders basically retrieve files and place them into (search engine internal) queing areas for the parsers to munch on.

Quality Links - noun phrase. A nonsense expression with no real value or purpose other than to act as a catchall for the types of links people think are better than “those other links”. Googlers use “quality links” as a subtle way of telling people to stop getting cheap spammy links. Many SEO forum moderators and admins use “quality links” in a somewhat broader but similar fashion, if only because they don’t know exactly what criteria make links good for any particular search engine but they recognize that people who are asking about linkage have a problem. Nearly everyone else seems to use the expression to refer to their (usually non-performing) backlinks. I wrote about high quality links at SEOmoz (in a post designed to rank for “high quality links” on the basis of content — but the lesson passed over everyone’s head, except for Aaron Pratt who saw what I was doing right away).

SERP - acronym for Search Engine Results Page. Everyone seems to know this acronym by now. I have always hated it even though I now reluctantly use it. SRP (search results page) would be better, since it’s all inclusive. You can have a DRP (Directory Results Page) which some people might argue should be called a DSRP (Directory Search Results Page). I still get click throughs from Yahoo! and DMOZ directory page listings (or a DLP, Directory Listings Page).

Sitelinks - noun. Google invented this term, which is better than my classic “little clustered links under the main listing”. Sitelinks are those “little clustered links under the main listing” that deep link into the site by category or topic. Many people wonder how these Sitelinks appear. Googlers always say, “That’s algorithmically determined and we have no control over them” — meaning, “We wrote special commands into our software to create those things and we’re not going to tell you what criteria are used to decide which sites get them.” My best guess is that sites that have more than 1,000 pages of content, clear content categorization in their non-breadcrumb internal links, and lots of deep links from other domains are good candidates for Sitelinks. Other criteria are probably taken into consideration. Sitelinks are only shown for the top listing in a popular query result.

Sitemap - noun. A page on your Web site that links to all the other pages, or at least to all the important section top-level pages. Google has usurped this expression for their “Google Sitemaps” feature (now incorporated into the XML Sitemaps standard supported by several major search engines), where you can upload a file listing all of your pages for their crawlers. I have noticed that Googlers are now speaking of HTML Sitemaps to distinguish those Web site pages from the XML Sitemaps. I think it would be best if everyone adopted the convention of saying “XML Sitemap” or “HTML Sitemap” so we are all on the same page.

Trust - noun. Currently the latest SEO buzz word. Generally speaking, the SEO community picks up on a concept about six months to two years after it’s been worked through by the search engineers. Hardcore spammers (the ultimate “Black Hat” SEOs) are usually pretty good at detecting trends before everyone else. Trust has now officially been done to death. It is incorporated into every algorithm (including Windows Live even though we all agree that Microsoft still has a way to go) and the search engines are already looking at other issues. Trust is being placed in the hands of the Webmasters, but most Webmasters don’t seem to want the responsibility.

Update - noun. From the SEO side, an update is any noticeable change to the way a search engine behaves. From the search engines’ side, an update is any intended change in a search engine’s makeup or data. Matt Cutts offers an incomplete explanation of a Google update in his December 2006 Explaining Algorithm Updates and Data Refreshes post. He wrote a similar post in September 2005 with What’s An Update?. I don’t expect Matt to confirm every algorithmic change. That would pretty much defeat the purpose of many of them. Yahoo! and Windows Live occasionally issue “weather reports”. Matt has informally issued some on Google’s behalf.

Uncertainty Principle of SEO: The two states of a Web document (indexed and relevance to a given set of queries) cannot be determined at the same time. The more queries to which a page is known to be relevant, the less information about the page’s indexing status can be determined. The more information about a page’s indexing status that is known, the fewer queries to which the page is relevant.

URL Listings or URL-only Listings - noun phrase. These are the site listings that appear in Google with nothing more than a URL. Matt Cutts explained that they are uncrawled links that Google knows something about from inbound linkage. Google will (or used to) occasionally pull a description from the Open Directory Project for uncrawled links, but you often see them without any description at all. Uncrawled links are not shown in Google’s SafeSearch mode. Matt also discussed them here.

Validate - verb. Every time I use this word people reach for their W3C manuals. When I speak of search engines validating Web sites, I don’t mean they are looking to see if the HTML code meets some arbitrary standard. I mean they pass each URL through a process whereby they establish, according to their own criteria, that the site is “not spam”. Many spam sites appear to validate. The search engines are not perfect. Nonetheless, many spam sites don’t last long because they don’t validate or their validation is revoked. Maybe I could have used a better expression, but I can’t think of one

Title: Glossary - SEO
Descr: SEO Terms - SEO Glossary - SEO Abbreviations
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