SEO and Webmaster Glossary

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

Anchor - clickable part of a web link.  For example - “this is a Seo blog“. Everything within quotation marks is a link, but only Seo blog is the anchor.

Authority -  one of the major factor in website ranking in Google, as of 2009. Authority is determined by such factors as Page Rank, internal link juice, diversity of backlinks, link growth rate and percentage of deep links.

B

Back links -  inbound links placed at other websites and pointing to a web page in question.

Ban -  exclusion of site from a Search engine index.  Usually a penalty for unethical SEO practices.
Black -hat SEO (search engine optimisation) - is a set of unethical SEO methods used to achieve higher rankings in Search Engines. Black-hat SEO techniques breaks rules and regulations of major Search Engine, creating poor web-user experience as they often substitute one content for another and thus deliver information that is different from what has been sought.

C

Cache - information stored locally on either your computer or in database of a Search engine, In the latter case cache is also referred to as index.  The reason for caching is that websites stored in cache load much quicker , besides caching reduces server load and usage of bandwidth.

Cloaking - a black-hat SEO technique used to deliver different information on a page to human visitors and search engine spiders. The purpose of cloaking is to increase webpage rankings for keywords that that page does not even have and thus substitute one kind of information with a totally different one (for instance, you were looking for “baby toys”, but instead found a porn site.)

D

Deep links - links that point to internal pages of your website, rather than it’s home page.

Doorway pages -  HTML pages that are SEO-optimized to a few keywords or phrases, thus giving them higher rankings in search engines and redirecting users immediately to a different destination (website); therefore a user never sees the doorway page itself, but  instead is presented with a website which may have very little or no relationship at all to what he/she was looking for via a search engine.

E

F

G

Google - the leading search engine in the world, delivering nearly 40% of all organic search traffic  to websites.

H

.htaccess - a simple ASCII (or text) file, placed in a particular directory of your site to make configuration changes (protect parts of your website by password, deny or allow certain IP addresses, redirect users from one page to another, make user-friendly URLs etc.).

When placed in a directory of a website, .htaccess directives apply to that directory and all subdirectories within that directory.  .htaccess can be edited with any text editor such as standard Windows Notepad.

For more information see Comprehensive guide to .htaccess

I

J

K

Keyword -  a word that is representative of a website topic and also used by Internet users to find relevant sites in Search Engines.

Key phrase  - essentially the same as keyword, but consisting of more than one word.

L

Link bait - promotion technique, in which one fills a website with a kind of content that entices readers to link naturally (voluntary) to the site in question.

Link farm - a collection of websites which include lots of links to improve search engine rankings of other (targeted) websites. In most cases link farms are created by computers using automated software.

M

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O

P

Parser - a special program/software, that scans data and breaks them into smaller elements according to certain rules. For example, a parser can scan though Internet websites, looking for a specific phrase or sentence, and then outputs those data in a convenient, usable form (e.g., a text file with list of phrases, sentences or ULRs; 1 item per line)

Q

R

Reverse TrustRank - is the opposite site of the Trustrank and refers to negative effects on your TrustRank by reckless link building policy that eventually backfires. If you avoid linking out to spam websites or websites that link (heavily) to spammers, and you may protect your website from a reverse Trustrank effect.

Robots.txt - also known as Robots Exclusion Protocol is a file placed in the root folder of your site to prevent Search Engines spiders from indexing particular parts or pages of your site from indexing. For more information see Robotstxt.org.

S

Session ID - also called session identifier, is a piece of data (in particular, part of ULR) that enables a website user to maintain an authenticated session without the need to re-enter password when he travels through various pages of that site.sd Session IDs are quite typical in standard forums (Phpbb, Vbulletin). They can also lead to duplicate content issues, as the same page with different Session IDs may get indexed as different URLs. To avoid this, webmasters use mod_rewrite function in .htacceess for removing session ids. URLs with Session ID look like this www.anywebsite.com/?session=

T

TrustRank  (also Trust or Trust Rank) - As of 2009, one of the major ranking factors on Google, introduced in 2004 in the original article Combating Web Spam with TrustRank. In simple terms TrustRank of a website  is derived from a website’s inbound and outbound links - the more authority sites (*.edu, *.gov, as well as well recognized news and social network sites) link to you and the less you link to spam websites (or websites that link to spammers), the better is your Trust rank. Other factors affecting the Trustrank are your prehistory of  domain registration data (what other websites you own and of which quality they are) have, as well as user data signals (information that Google collects through various 3rd party means about your sites with the purpose to find out how naturally they look).  There is also a reciprocal effect called Reverse TrustRank.

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