SEO Glossary
When I entered the SEO world and began reading articles, I was confused by all the terms flung around, and it took me a good bit of time to learn the meanings of everything. Here’s a glossary to make things easier for the newcomers to the business.
Anchor Text: The text used in a link. This helps search engines know what you’re linking to and uses it to rank the target site.
Backlinks: Links that point to your site, used in determining PageRank and affect your search engine rankings.
Big Daddy: The nickname for a major Google structural change rolled out at the beginning of 2006, designed to fight spam and increase usability. Generally spoken of negatively as it seems to have had adverse affects on legitimate sites.
Black Hat: SEO’ers who use illegitimate techniques to boost their search engine rankings, like spamming, cloaking, and hidden links and text.
Blacklisted: The term used to denote when a site has been removed from a search engine index for violating TOS.
Bots: Scripts that automate certain tasks - search engine bots visit web pages, save them, and follow links.
Cloaking: Showing a different page to a user than what was shown to the search engine (Blacklistable offense).
Co-op: Any exchange of links by a group (this does not include direct person to person exchanges).
Crawling: The action done by search engine bots when analyzing web pages and following links.
Defensible Traffic: Traffic that is not based upon search engines or social search - bookmarks, RSS traffic, type-in traffic, mailing list subscribers. Traffic that will keep coming to your site even if Google and all the other search and social search engines dropped you.
Directory: A collection of links to various sites like Yahoo! Directory or DMOZ.org, generally run by a person or persons rather than an algorithm.
Gray Hat: An SEO’er who uses borderline techniques in order to boost search engine rankings.
Google Dance: Massive fluctuations in the Google Rankings due to periodic reindexing (more info…).
Hidden Links/Text: Text or links that or obscured or hidden in some way, generally by matching the color of the font to the background, in order to maximize keyword density or links.
Linkbait: Creating unique, interesting, and/or controversial content (any media form) that other people will link to. Made for the main purpose of getting links.
PlusBox: Google’s plus (+) sign box next to some search results with additional information.
PR: Page Rank. This is Google’s general value of worth of a site and is based on the number and quality of backlinks to your site. Also, may or may not be a factor in search engine rankings.
OneBox: At the top of Google’s search results, additional information is displayed, including images, stock prices, definitions, etc. depending on the query. OneBox suggests that it is an all-purpose display area.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization - really hope you knew that one, otherwise you’ve got a lot of learning to do ;). The process of altering a site and getting links to it in order to increase its rankings.
SEM: Search Engine Marketing - the evolved version of SEO. Includes link-building strategies such as linkbaiting and as well as normal marketing practices.
Spamming: Black-hat technique. Going to unrelated forums, blogs, etc and posting links to a site. Also creating large amounts of pages with no purpose other than to boost another pages backlinks and PageRank.
Stuffing: Filling a page with certain keywords to make the page rank highly for that term. Occasionally used by black-hats to create pages with no content except for that keyword.
TOS: Terms of Service. These are the terms you implicitly agree to when your site is added to a search engine.
White Hat: SEOer’s that follow the rules entirely, and don’t do anything that might be considered unscrupulous.
There you are. Let me know if I’ve missed anything, and I hope this helps.
