Redirect: A command used to automatically send the user of one webpage to a another. This is used for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes. Search engines place penalties on the use of some methods which may be used to mislead the users of search engines (such as meta redirects).

Relevancy: The measure by which a webpage matches a search engine user’s query. Search engines list the most relevant pages first (if possible), continuing those with the least relevancy to the search query.

Robots.txt: A file used within the root directory of a website that restricts the indexing of selected web pages or directories.

Sandbox Effect: Alleged filter that enacts a probationary period for links to new websites, which diminishes their ability to pass Pagerank during this period. There is speculation that the sandbox may affect the sites themselves for a short period of time. The name was coined in that new sites can play nicely away from other […]

Search Engine-Friendly: A webpage that has been designed and optimized using search engine ranking methods in mind. The pages are structured to be easily crawled by search engine spiders, are keyword rich, and have maximum exposure in terms of backlinks from authority sites.

Search Engine Result Pages (aka SERPs): Ranked listings of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a user’s search query.