SEO Glossary

Paid Inclusion: Payment to a search engine or directory to be listed with their service. Most worthy search engines will find you with their robots through incoming links. Paid inclusion may be helpful in some directories if they provide traffic.

Penalty: Search engines may lower the rankings for some sites that are in violation of the search engines’ terms of use, or may remove the offending site from their index altogether.

Ranking: Order in which webpages are listed in the Search Engine Result Pages for a particular keyword phrase for a user’s search query. The pages that the rankings are listed on are called SERPs (see search engine result pages).

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 […]