Google Webmasters Help FAQ

Webmaster-slang can take a while to get used to. Here are some of the words and phrases that you will hear from time to time. This is not an attempt at a full glossary of all search engine specific terms but rather a very short summary of some of the more common terms. For a full and constantly updated glossary, see Aaron Wall’s http://www.seobook.com/glossary/.

• Absolute URLs/links: This is when the full URL of a page is specified in a link, eg: <a href=”http://www.utc.edu/Faculty/Manuel-Santiago/Silly_puddy.htm”> … </a>. The other kind is a relative URL / link (which would be relative from the page where the user is at the moment). The advantage of an absolute URL/link is that the link will always be correct, no matter where the page is that is linking.
• Adsense / Adwords: Adwords is a service that Google provides to allow businesses to advertise their websites on Google’s search and other websites. Adsense is a service that Google provides to allow websites to display advertising from Adwords-advertisers.
• Affiliate marketing: Many businesses allow webmasters to promote their products and services by linking with a special kind of link. When visitors use these links to buy the products / services, the webmaster may receive a commission.
• AJAX: A term commonly used to describe the use of Javascript on a web-page (technically it only applies when certain a functionality is used, but that is often unrecognizable to the user).
• ALT-text: Search engines (and blind users) cannot “understand” images. For images an “ALT-text” may be specified to describe the image. This attribute is important for search engines, especially when a large portion of a page is filled with images. IE shows the ALT text as tooltip on mouseover, for FF users one must add a TITLE text.
• Anchor-text: This is the text that is used within a link, the “clickable” part of the link. Example: <a href=”…”>ANCHOR TEXT</a>
• Ban: When a site does something “really bad” it can be banned (removed completely from Google’s index) for either a specific period of time (eg 30 days) or forever (until it is resolved). To signal that a site has resolved the issues that caused a ban, you may file a reinclusion request.
• Cache: Google stores a copy of each crawled page in its database. If the webmaster didn’t make use of the NOCACHE directive in the robots meta element, Google shows it for toolbar users and provides a link on its SERPs. In the header of Google’s “view cached page” you’ll find Googlebot’s timestamp.
• Canonical issues: A Web site has canonical issues when its pages are reachable under different URLs. If www.example.com/page.htm and example.com/page.htm (or www.example.com/ and www.example.com/index.htm) both deliver identical contents, search engine rankings are toast. All possible URL variations must redirect permanently to one canonical address. In the Google Webmaster Console set thre preferred domain name to www.example.com or example.com and make sure to link accordingly.
• Cloaking: The canonical definition of cloaking is “serving different content to users and search engines”. Search engines dislike hardcore cloaking, that means for example delivering clean articles on serious topics to crawlers whilst human users get redirected to a PPC popup hell. SEs prefer that their crawlers are treated like human visitors, so that spiders get the exactly same page as browsers of searchers render it. However, SEs encourage and approve search engine friendly cloaking to enhance crawlability, and they have no issues with geo targeting and similar methods of UA/IP based content delivery. Search engines judge cloaking based on intent.
• Crawl: This is when the search engine comes to your site and starts to look at your pages, following the links on them. Once the content is known, the search engine will decide whether or not to index it. The [crawl-frequency] is determined through many factors.
• Data-center: One of the many computer-systems in Google’s network.
• Deep link (inbound): When a link from someone else’s website points to a lower level page on your website (not to the main page).
• DNS:
• Doorway pages:
• Duplicate content:
• Inbound link / inlink / backlink: A link from someone else’s website pointing to a page on your website.
• Index: This is when the search engine takes the content that it found during a crawl and shows it in the search results.
• IP Address:
• Javascript: Is a kind of programming language that can be included with web-pages. Javascript can show new or different content, it can be used to build menus and fancy behavior. Search engines can not understand Javascript and will not index content that is created with Javascript.
• Keyword density: A measure of how many times a specific keyword is repeated within a page. Using a keyword too many times is called “keyword stuffing”.
• Long tail of search:
• [Meta tags]: Tags used within the ‘head’ section of a page. The tags commonly used by search engines are ‘robots’ and ‘description’.
• [Nofollow links]: Links that are marked with the ‘nofollow’ attribute are not to be counted as a positive reference for the URL that is linked.
• Outbound link: When your website links out to someone else’s website.
• Pagerank: A metric that Google determines based on the links to a page
• Penalty: What a website gets when it does something slightly against Google’s webmaster guidelines. A penalized page / site is still listed in the search results. A banned site is completely removed.
• Redirect: This is what happens when you go to a page and are automatically transfered somewhere else. There are several types of redirects: [server-side redirects], [meta-refresh redirects] and [javascript redirects]. Search engines will only follow the server-side and meta-refresh redirects.
• Reinclusion request: Acknowledging the possibly issues within your website and (after having fixed those issues) asking Google to reinclude the site in the index. This may also be done when a site does not have a ban (for penalties).
• robots.txt: A file used to limit the crawling of search engines within a website.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): Optimizing a website (including external factors) for optimal search engine presence.
• Search engine marketing (SEM): Marketing (advertising) a website through search engines (usually in form of paid results / ads).
• Search engine results page (SERP): The page returned with results for a search that was issued.
• Server status codes: Your server returns a number with all responses. This number tells the user (or search engine) something about the response. Some of the more common numbers are: 200 - OK, [301 - permanent redirect], [302 - temporary redirect], [404 - not found], [503 - unavailable]. Search engines need a code “200″ in order to index a page’s contents. (definitions, test)
• Sitemap (HTML): A page in your website made for visitors to link to the most important pages within your website.
• Sitemap (XML): A file created specifically for search engines with addresses of all the pages within your site. A HTML sitemap page may not be used as a XML sitemap file.
• Supplemental index:
• URL: The address of a web-page, eg http://webmastershelp.iblogget.com/2007/03/09/words/

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