The guys over SEOMoz have published the “Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon.” Below you will find my favorite ones:
Cloak: The practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. This Black Hat tactic is frowned upon by the search engines and caries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.
Doorway (gateway): A web page that is designed to attract traffic from a search engine and then redirect it to another site or page. A doorway page is not exactly the same as cloaking but the effect is the same in that users and search engines are served different content.
Google bomb: The combined effort of multiple webmasters to change the Google search results usually for humorous effect. The “miserable failure” - George Bush, and “greatest living American” - Steven Colbert Google bombs are famous examples.
Google bowling: Maliciously trying to lower a sites rank by sending it links from the “bad neighborhood” - Kind of like yelling “Good luck with that infection!” to your buddy as you get off the school bus - there is some controversy as to if this works or is just an SEO urban myth.
Google dance: The change in SERPs caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The cause of great angst and consternation for webmasters who slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.
Hub: (expert page) a trusted page with high quality content that links out to related pages.
Keyword Cannibalization: The excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. This practice makes it difficult for the users and the search engines to determine which page is most relevant for the keyword.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as “Long Tail Searches”. The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. See also “long tail”. The significance is that it might be almost impossible to rank well for “mortgage”, but fairly easy to rank for “second mortgage to finance monster truck team”. Go figure.
Link Condom: Any of several methods used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible detrimental results of indorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage link spam in user generated content.
Sandbox: There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a “sandbox,” preventing them from ranking well for anything until a set period of time has passed. The existence or exact behavior of the sandbox is not universally accepted among SEOs.
Keep your Website Fresh for SEO
Keeping it fresh is another thing that is great for SEO. Make sure to update your website once a week.
The changes don't have to be big. They could be very small like changing the homepage text or posting comments on your services page. Any change will be considered as keeping your site fresh which search engines love. One of the worst things you can do for SEO is to have a stale website.
No one likes outdated information and neither do search engines.
The changes don't have to be big. They could be very small like changing the homepage text or posting comments on your services page. Any change will be considered as keeping your site fresh which search engines love. One of the worst things you can do for SEO is to have a stale website.
No one likes outdated information and neither do search engines.
Webmasters Still Feeling Aftershocks of Google SERP changes
By: Navneet Kaushal
At the beginning of this month, I had reported about the Google SERP changes for July 2008 along with the confusion and chaos it had created. It seems that, the Webmasters are still feeling the aftershocks of the Google SERP changes and according to some, these massive fluctuations are still happening.
Webmaster World had a long thread regarding these fluctuations at the beginning of the Google SERP changes. Now, that thread has been expanded to a 'Part 2' series, discussing the ongoing fluctuations in Rankings in Google SERPs. Here are some of the posts from that thread:
"I run a large, well-established website that has been around for years, generating millions of visitors per month across millions of pages of documents. We have always been diligent about tracking all of our website metrics so that we understand user behavior, where our audience is coming from, and can use the data in order to improve user experience.
Recently we have been experiencing *very* erratic Google organic traffic which jumps up and down by 30%-80%. The cycle has now repeated itself 6 times over about 6 weeks time. While there have been times in the past where our Google organic traffic has increased and decreased, it always has done it in a measured manner; we have never before seen erratic behavior from Google.
Here are the traffic specifics:
June 3, Google organic drops by 30% vs. normal
June 4, Google organic traffic returns to normal
June 9, Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
June 17, Google organic returns to normal
June 19 , Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
June 27, Google organic returns to normal
July 9, Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
July 11, Google organic returns to normal
July 12, Google organic again drops, but this time by 80% of normal
July 13, Google organic returns to normal
While we are constantly in the process of refining our site, the only major change over the last couple months has been to our "related articles" component which does what it sounds like: if you are looking at article A, here are a handful of other articles that are highly relevant to the one you are viewing. Over time, we have been tuning the algorithm that generates these links so as to improve relevancy.
I have also noticed some other artifacts:
Google bot spidering activity has increased, reaching a plateau of about 140% of pre-link change levels; on some days approaching 1 million pages/day.
The number of page indexed in our Google Webmaster site map reports jumped by 12%.
Any ideas about what might be going on here?"
"Its an update to my previous post, well i had fixed the metas errors in google webmaster tool. Its been little over a week now and errors are reducing by like 30-50 a day. its probably going to take a month for google bot to remove it completely."
"it can be a tip of an ice berg before it hit you badly. Start looking for potential problems in your pages e.g dupe content, meta titles/desc and key word stuffing and any thing which is breaching google tos."
"We are not doing any purposeful keyword stuffing of any sort, however we have over 5 million articles on our site and it is certainly possible that when we are pulling over "related articles" that the titles are very similar.
Is it normal to see organics go up and down repeatedly prior to a penalty?"
"I think that's extremely unlikely. Google wants webmasters to use their service - and all it does is give you reports and a way to communicate as the authenticated responsible person. In other words, it's a report only, and not a cuase of anything.
Depending on how you generate a sitemap you may introduce spidering problems, expose duplicated urls and so on - that I can see possibly causing some trouble. But not just a WMT account on its own. And I've got scores of them as background experience, too."
Webmasters Still Feeling Aftershocks of Google SERP changes
At the beginning of this month, I had reported about the Google SERP changes for July 2008 along with the confusion and chaos it had created. It seems that, the Webmasters are still feeling the aftershocks of the Google SERP changes and according to some, these massive fluctuations are still happening.
Webmaster World had a long thread regarding these fluctuations at the beginning of the Google SERP changes. Now, that thread has been expanded to a 'Part 2' series, discussing the ongoing fluctuations in Rankings in Google SERPs. Here are some of the posts from that thread:
"I run a large, well-established website that has been around for years, generating millions of visitors per month across millions of pages of documents. We have always been diligent about tracking all of our website metrics so that we understand user behavior, where our audience is coming from, and can use the data in order to improve user experience.
Recently we have been experiencing *very* erratic Google organic traffic which jumps up and down by 30%-80%. The cycle has now repeated itself 6 times over about 6 weeks time. While there have been times in the past where our Google organic traffic has increased and decreased, it always has done it in a measured manner; we have never before seen erratic behavior from Google.
Here are the traffic specifics:
June 3, Google organic drops by 30% vs. normal
June 4, Google organic traffic returns to normal
June 9, Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
June 17, Google organic returns to normal
June 19 , Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
June 27, Google organic returns to normal
July 9, Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
July 11, Google organic returns to normal
July 12, Google organic again drops, but this time by 80% of normal
July 13, Google organic returns to normal
While we are constantly in the process of refining our site, the only major change over the last couple months has been to our "related articles" component which does what it sounds like: if you are looking at article A, here are a handful of other articles that are highly relevant to the one you are viewing. Over time, we have been tuning the algorithm that generates these links so as to improve relevancy.
I have also noticed some other artifacts:
Google bot spidering activity has increased, reaching a plateau of about 140% of pre-link change levels; on some days approaching 1 million pages/day.
The number of page indexed in our Google Webmaster site map reports jumped by 12%.
Any ideas about what might be going on here?"
"Its an update to my previous post, well i had fixed the metas errors in google webmaster tool. Its been little over a week now and errors are reducing by like 30-50 a day. its probably going to take a month for google bot to remove it completely."
"it can be a tip of an ice berg before it hit you badly. Start looking for potential problems in your pages e.g dupe content, meta titles/desc and key word stuffing and any thing which is breaching google tos."
"We are not doing any purposeful keyword stuffing of any sort, however we have over 5 million articles on our site and it is certainly possible that when we are pulling over "related articles" that the titles are very similar.
Is it normal to see organics go up and down repeatedly prior to a penalty?"
"I think that's extremely unlikely. Google wants webmasters to use their service - and all it does is give you reports and a way to communicate as the authenticated responsible person. In other words, it's a report only, and not a cuase of anything.
Depending on how you generate a sitemap you may introduce spidering problems, expose duplicated urls and so on - that I can see possibly causing some trouble. But not just a WMT account on its own. And I've got scores of them as background experience, too."
Webmasters Still Feeling Aftershocks of Google SERP changes
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