Search Engine Glossary

Search Engine Glossary

Affiliate program - a partnership type of program in which you help another website sell products or services on your website. You get a kickback on each sale. Amazon and Wordtracker, for example, both support affiliate relationships.

Bot - see crawler.

Bounce Rate - percentage of users that leave a web site after visiting only the entrance page.

Cache - a place used to store information on a temporary basis. Search engines often cache the information they use for indexing to speed up their processing time. Your browser will cache web pages that you access on your local computer to minimize the reloading of the same pages from the host. Hosts, in turn, cache their frequently requested pages.

Character-set-betical positioning - an FTB site, such as most directories, that lists returned sites from a search in ASCII set order for each category.

Client - the browser on the user's system that is requesting pages from a host system. The term is often used to describe the person using the browser, the person you are trying to reach with your message.

Click-through - the act of clicking on a site returned in a search engine listing to get to the web site referenced. It is not enough for a user just to see your site in a good search engine position. You want to motivate them from the listing to click-through to your site.

Cloaking - the process of returning altered web pages to search engines crawling the site. In other words, the web server is programmed to return one content to the search engine. To users it returns another content. The purpose is to distort search engine rankings. Search engines consider cloaking a form of spamindexing.

Comment tag - tags used in the page coding () to denote comments for the programmer and are invisible to the person viewing the actual page. Keyword phrases embedded in comment tags are not read by the search engines. The comment tag is also used to hide JavaScript code from browsers that don't support JavaScript.

Conversion rate - the percentage of people arriving at your site that take the actual action step.

Cookie - information stored on your system by a host system that enables the host system to service you better and more efficiently. A cookie is often used to store your preferences for the host site on your system. A given cookie can only be read by a host system that put it there. One problem is that many sites use banner ads supported by other companies on their site, the most common being banners from Double-Click. This means that Double-Click is monitoring their cookies from your system for any sites with and banner ads and tracking your Internet surfing from this. You can turn the cookies off for your browser; but many, many sites won't load if the cookies are off.

CPC - Cost-per-click for a paid advertisement; i.e., what you are charged each time someone clicks into your site from the ad.

Crawled Pages Lag Time - the time delay in a search engine before the spider returns after indexing your main page to return, crawl through the other pages, and index them.

Crawler - a search engine spider or bot that visits and reads web pages on the internet for the purpose of creating entries for the index of a search engine. The Google crawler is called googlebot.

CSS - Cascading style sheets. A method of support in HTML of controlling the display of elements of a web page.

Directory - a server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing web pages and returning lists of pages that match particular queries. They differ from search engines in that a submission request is given to a human, and the human decides if, when, and how the web pages will be indexed. In addition, the entry is indexed in terms of a specific category.

Domain name - a name assigned to an IP address by a registrar. It's easier to remember those domain names than the numeric values of the IPs. Domain Name Servers (DNS) on the Internet connect the requested name to the numeric IP used to access a page. For example, our business site has an IP of 208.56.131.130. The domain name is netadventures.biz. You can use either in the http:// address line to access the site.

Doorway page - (see Gateway Page)

Dynamic Content Pages - those pages on your site in which content is developed on the fly. These pages are often .ASP, .PHP, or .CFM pages. The page is created when it is requested and returned to the user.

Dynamic Linking - a link in which the actual address (URL) is calculated when the page is requested. Flash and JavaScript links are dynamic. So are URLs that have special characters such as &, =, and ?. Spiders cannot be trusted to calculate URLs, so these links are often missed in spidering and calculating link reputation.

FFA - a "free-for-all" page listing sites of unrelated subjects which anyone can post on their site to increase linking. These do little or nothing to boost your page rank, and generally penalizes your position. Like a link farm, the FFA site has little content and no central theme.

FTB - Free Traffic-Building Sites - Web sites that you can use to promote your web site that are free for the purpose of enabling other people using the Internet to find you. Search Engines and some directories are two of these types.

Gateway Page - a page designed as an entrance page to your site. In some cases it is optimized for a specific keyword phrase or search engine. It is also referred to by some as a doorway page. By definition, it has no links into it from your site.

Google Dance - a reference to the fact that in results returned by Google, the relevancy scores can change suddenly for no apparent reason, then possibly return to a more normal listing shortly after. The most notorious was the Florida Dance that happened at the end of November of 2003, upsetting the positioning of many sites going into the heavy online shopping season. There are normal dances during the Google index time as sites shift in position up and down over the indexing period.

(This is a portion of the full glossary in the book.)

See Carl's book on Web Site Promotion and Search Engine Positioning for more..

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