Look up any SEO term in seconds.

Technical

404 Error

A 404 is the HTTP status code returned when a requested URL does not exist. Some are normal and healthy on any site. They become a problem when they hit URLs that have inbound links, internal links or historical search rankings behind them.

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Above the Fold

Above the fold is everything a visitor sees before scrolling. On the web it varies by device, so it is a zone rather than a fixed line. What sits there decides whether most visitors keep reading or leave within a few seconds.

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AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

AEO is the practice of shaping content so AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews quote it directly. It rewards clear structure, stated facts and self-contained answers rather than keyword repetition, because these systems extract passages instead of ranking pages.

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Algorithm Update

An algorithm update is a change Google makes to how it ranks pages. Broad core updates run a few times a year and reshuffle results widely. Smaller updates target specific problems such as spam, reviews or helpful content, and often go unannounced.

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Alt Text

Alt text is the written description attached to an image in HTML. Screen readers read it aloud to visually impaired users, and it appears if the image fails to load. Search engines also use it to understand images they cannot otherwise interpret.

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Anchor Link

An anchor link, or jump link, points to a specific section within a page using a fragment identifier. Google sometimes uses these to link directly to the relevant passage in its search results, which improves the experience on very long pages.

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Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable wording of a link. Search engines read it as a short description of the destination, so it influences what the linked page is understood to be about. It also tells human readers what to expect before clicking.

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Authority

Authority describes how much trust a site or page has earned in the eyes of search engines, mostly through quality links and consistent subject expertise. Google publishes no authority score, so the numbers marketers quote come from third-party tools estimating it.

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Backlink

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Search engines read it as an endorsement, which makes it one of the strongest ranking signals. Relevance and trustworthiness of the linking site matter far more than the raw number of links.

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Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO covers tactics that break search engine guidelines to win rankings, such as cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text, doorway pages and buying links. They can work briefly and carry a real risk of penalties or full removal from search results.

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Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the share of visits where someone views one page and leaves without a second interaction. In GA4 the equivalent is the inverse of engagement rate, which counts sessions lasting over ten seconds or including a conversion or second page view.

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Branded Keyword

A branded keyword is any search containing your company or product name, such as 'central audit pricing'. These searches come from people who already know you, so they convert far better than generic terms but measure demand you created elsewhere.

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Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumbs are a secondary navigation trail showing where a page sits in the site hierarchy, usually near the top as links like Home > Glossary > Crawl Budget. They help users move up a level and can replace the URL shown in Google's results.

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Broken Link

A broken link points to a URL that no longer resolves, usually returning a 404 or 410 status code. They appear when pages are deleted or renamed without redirects, and they waste crawl budget while sending real visitors to dead ends.

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Canonical Tag

A canonical tag is an HTML element naming the preferred URL when the same content is reachable at several different addresses. It tells search engines which version to index and rank, consolidating ranking signals instead of splitting them across near-identical duplicates.

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Citation (Local)

A local citation is any online mention of your business name, address and phone number, whether or not it links back to you. Directories, chamber listings and industry sites all count. Consistent citations reinforce the location signals behind local search rankings.

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Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-through rate is the share of searchers who click your result after seeing it. Search Console reports it per query and per page. It reflects how compelling your title and description are relative to everything else on the results page.

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Cloaking

Cloaking means showing search engines different content from what real visitors see, usually by detecting the crawler's user agent or IP address. It is an explicit guidelines violation and one of the few tactics that reliably earns a manual penalty from Google.

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CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift)

Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much visible content moves unexpectedly while a page loads. A score of 0.1 or below is good. It is the metric behind the experience of reaching for a button just as the page jumps and hitting something else.

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Content Audit

A content audit is a systematic review of every page on a site, judging quality, accuracy, search performance and business value. The output is a decision for each URL: keep as is, update, consolidate with another page, or remove entirely.

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Content Decay

Content decay is the gradual traffic loss an article suffers as it ages. Facts go stale, competitors publish fresher work, and search intent shifts. The page did not get worse, but its relative standing did, and rankings follow relative standing.

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Content Freshness

Content freshness is how recently a page was meaningfully updated. It matters greatly for time-sensitive topics and barely at all for stable ones, which is why blanket re-dating strategies produce no benefit whatsoever and can quietly cost you real credibility.

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Content Pruning

Content pruning is the deliberate removal or consolidation of pages that add no value, such as thin posts, outdated announcements and duplicate articles. Done carefully it improves crawl efficiency and can raise the perceived quality of the site as a whole.

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Content Strategy

Content strategy is the plan governing what you publish, for whom, and why. It connects business goals to search demand, decides which topics to own, and sets the priority order so effort goes where it will actually produce a return.

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Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the share of visitors who complete a desired action, such as a purchase, form submission or call. In SEO it is what turns rankings into revenue, and it decides whether traffic growth is worth anything at all.

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Core Update

A core update is a broad change to Google's main ranking systems, rolled out a few times per year over one to three weeks. It reassesses relevance and quality across all sites, so rankings can shift substantially without anything on your site changing.

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Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are Google's three page experience metrics: Largest Contentful Paint for loading speed, Interaction to Next Paint for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift for visual stability. They are measured from real Chrome users in the field, not from laboratory tests.

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Crawl Budget

Crawl budget is the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site in a given period. It is set by how fast your server responds and how much Google wants your content. When it runs out, new or updated pages sit unseen and unranked.

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Crawl Depth

Crawl depth is the number of clicks from your homepage to a given page. Pages three or fewer clicks deep are crawled often and treated as important. Pages buried six or more levels down are crawled rarely and frequently never indexed.

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Crawl Rate

Crawl rate is how frequently search engine bots request pages from your website. Google sets it automatically based on your server's responsiveness and its own demand for your content, raising the rate when your site is consistently fast and healthy.

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Digital PR

Digital PR is the practice of earning coverage and links from journalists and publications by creating genuinely newsworthy material, such as original research, data studies or expert commentary. It is the most durable form of link building currently available to any business.

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Disavow

Disavowing is a Search Console request asking Google to ignore specific backlinks pointing at your site. It is a last resort for spam links you cannot get removed, and Google now says most sites should never need to use the tool at all.

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Dofollow

Dofollow describes a normal link that passes ranking credit through to its destination page. There is no actual dofollow attribute in HTML. The term simply means the link carries none of the rel="nofollow", rel="sponsored" or rel="ugc" attributes that withhold that credit.

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Domain Authority

Domain Authority is a Moz score from 1 to 100 predicting how likely a domain is to rank in search results. It is calculated from backlink data. Google does not use it in any way, but it remains a common shorthand for comparing sites.

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Domain Rating

Domain Rating is Ahrefs' 0 to 100 measure of how strong a website's backlink profile is, based on the quantity and quality of linking domains. Like Domain Authority it is a third-party estimate rather than anything Google itself publishes or uses to rank pages.

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Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is the same or near-identical content appearing at more than one URL, either on your own site or across different sites. Search engines must choose one version to rank, which splits signals and often surfaces the wrong page.

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Dwell Time

Dwell time is how long a searcher stays on your page before returning to the results. It sits between bounce rate and time on page conceptually. Google has never confirmed using it directly, but it reflects whether a result satisfied the query.

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E-E-A-T

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. These are the criteria set out in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines. They are not a direct ranking factor in themselves, but they describe what Google's ranking systems are built to approximate.

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Entity SEO

Entity SEO means optimising for the people, products, places and concepts a search engine recognises, rather than for keyword strings. Google maps content to entities in its Knowledge Graph, so clear entity signals help it connect your brand to a subject.

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Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation lets visitors filter listings by attributes such as size, colour, price or brand. It is excellent for users and hazardous for SEO, because each filter combination can generate its own distinct crawlable URL, multiplying the number of indexable pages exponentially.

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FAQ Schema

FAQ schema is structured data marking up a page's questions and their answers. It gives search engines and AI systems clean question-answer pairs to extract. Google restricted its rich result display in 2023, but the markup still aids machine understanding.

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Featured Image

A featured image is the primary image associated with a page or post, used in listings, social previews and sometimes in search results themselves. It affects click-through from every surface where your content appears, not only from the search results.

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Featured Snippet

A featured snippet is the answer box above the standard organic results, extracted verbatim from a ranking page. Formats include paragraphs, lists and tables. Winning one usually requires ranking on page one and answering the question in a clean, liftable passage.

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FID (First Input Delay)

First Input Delay measured the time between a user's first interaction with a page and the browser beginning to respond. It was retired as a Core Web Vital in March 2024 and replaced by Interaction to Next Paint, which measures far more.

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GEO (Geographic SEO)

GEO is optimisation for location-based searches. It covers Google Business Profile, local citations, service-area pages and consistent name, address and phone data across the web. It matters for any business whose customers are limited by how far they are willing to travel.

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Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is the free listing that controls how your business appears in Google Maps and the local pack. Categories, reviews, hours, photos and posts all feed it. For businesses with a physical presence it often outranks the website itself.

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Google Search Console

Google Search Console is Google's free reporting tool for site owners. It shows how Google crawls, indexes and ranks your pages, and reports impressions, clicks, indexing status and technical errors. It is the only first-party source for any of this data.

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Heading Tags

Heading tags are the H1 to H6 elements that structure a page's content. The H1 states the page's subject, and lower levels nest beneath it. They help readers scan, assistive technology navigate, and search engines understand what each section actually covers.

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Hreflang

Hreflang is an annotation telling search engines which language or regional version of a page to serve to which audience. It prevents your US page outranking your UK page for UK searchers, and stops translated versions being treated as duplicates.

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HTTPS

HTTPS is the encrypted version of HTTP, secured by a TLS certificate. It protects data travelling between browser and server from interception. Google confirmed it as a lightweight ranking signal in 2014, and browsers now warn users about sites without it.

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Image Optimization

Image optimisation means serving pictures at the right dimensions, in modern formats such as WebP or AVIF, compressed sensibly and lazy-loaded where that is appropriate. It is usually the largest single performance gain available on any content-heavy or ecommerce website.

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Impressions

An impression is counted each time your page appears in search results for a query, whether or not anyone scrolls to see it. Search Console reports impressions alongside clicks, and the relationship between them reveals how visible and how compelling you are.

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Index Bloat

Index bloat means having far more URLs indexed than you have genuinely valuable pages. It is usually caused by parameters, faceted navigation, tag archives, pagination or internal search results being left crawlable and indexable when they should not have been.

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Indexation

Indexation is the process of a search engine storing a crawled page so it can be returned in results. Crawling and indexing are separate steps. A page can be crawled and then deliberately not indexed, in which case it cannot rank at all.

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IndexNow

IndexNow is an open protocol that lets a site notify search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted, instead of waiting for the next crawl. Bing, Yandex, Seznam and Naver support it. Google has trialled it but does not use it.

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INP (Interaction to Next Paint)

Interaction to Next Paint measures how quickly a page responds visually after a user taps, clicks or types. It replaced First Input Delay as a Core Web Vital in March 2024. A good score is 200 milliseconds or less, measured across the whole visit.

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Internal Linking

Internal linking is the practice of linking between the pages on your own website. These links help crawlers discover new content, distribute authority through the site, signal which pages matter most, and guide readers towards whatever they should read next.

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JavaScript SEO

JavaScript SEO covers the work of making content generated by JavaScript visible to search engines. Google does render JavaScript, but in a second pass that can be delayed. Other crawlers and AI systems often do not render it at all.

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JSON-LD

JSON-LD is the structured data format Google recommends. It sits in a script block in the page head, separate from the visible markup, which makes it far easier to add and maintain than inline formats such as Microdata or RDFa.

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Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalisation happens when two or more pages on your own site compete for the same query. Search engines struggle to choose between them, so signals split and neither page ranks as well as one consolidated page would have done.

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Keyword Density

Keyword density is the percentage of a page's total words that are a given keyword. It was an actual ranking factor in the early 2000s and is now obsolete. Modern search engines evaluate topical relevance and meaning, not repetition counts.

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Keyword Difficulty

Keyword difficulty is a tool-generated score, usually 0 to 100, estimating how hard it would be to rank on page one for a given term. It is calculated mainly from the backlink profiles of the pages currently ranking for it.

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Keyword Intent

Keyword intent is the underlying goal behind a search. The four standard categories are informational, navigational, commercial investigation and transactional. Matching your page format and depth to the intent behind a query matters far more than matching the keyword itself.

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Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of finding the terms your audience actually searches for, then judging each one by search volume, difficulty, intent and commercial value. It decides what you go on to create, so mistakes here waste every hour spent downstream.

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Knowledge Panel

A knowledge panel is the information box Google shows beside results for recognised entities such as companies, people and places. It is generated from the Knowledge Graph rather than your website, so you influence it indirectly rather than editing it.

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Landing Page

A landing page is any page where a visitor first arrives on your site. In SEO it usually means a page built to rank for a specific query and convert that visitor, with its content, structure and call to action all aimed at one intent.

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LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)

Largest Contentful Paint measures how long the biggest visible element takes to render, usually a hero image, a video poster or a large text block. A good score is 2.5 seconds or less, timed from when the page first starts loading.

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Link Building

Link building is the practice of earning links from other websites back to yours. Legitimate methods include digital PR, original research, expert commentary and genuinely useful free tools. Buying links violates Google's guidelines and risks a manual penalty against your site.

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Link Equity

Link equity is the ranking value passed through a hyperlink, shaped by the linking page's own authority, its topical relevance and how many other links share that same page. Both internal and external links pass it, which is often overlooked.

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Local Pack

The local pack is the map plus three business listings that Google shows for location-based queries. It appears above all of the standard organic results. Ranking within it depends on relevance, distance and prominence rather than on conventional website ranking factors.

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Local SEO

Local SEO is the practice of improving visibility for searches that carry geographic intent, whether or not a city name is actually typed into the box. It combines Google Business Profile management, citation consistency, local content and reviews with conventional on-site optimisation.

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Log File Analysis

Log file analysis means reading raw server logs to see exactly which URLs search engine bots requested, how often, and what status code each request returned. It is the only source that shows real crawler behaviour rather than estimates of it.

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Long-tail Keyword

A long-tail keyword is a longer, more specific search phrase with lower individual volume. Collectively these queries account for most search demand. They face far less competition and usually convert better, because the searcher has already narrowed what they want.

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Meta Description

A meta description is the short summary tag that search engines may display beneath your title in results. It is not a ranking factor, but a well-written one raises click-through rate, which decides how much traffic a given ranking actually delivers.

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Mobile-First Indexing

Mobile-first indexing means Google uses the mobile version of your pages for indexing and ranking. It has applied to all sites since 2023. If content is hidden, trimmed or absent on mobile, Google effectively does not see it at all.

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NAP (Name, Address, Phone)

NAP stands for Name, Address and Phone number, the three business details that must match exactly everywhere they appear online. Inconsistent NAP data confuses search engines about which business is which, and that confusion directly suppresses your local search rankings.

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Nofollow

Nofollow is a link attribute telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through that particular link. It suits paid placements, user-generated content and untrusted sources. Since 2019 Google has treated it as a hint rather than a strict instruction.

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Nofollow Sponsored

The rel="sponsored" attribute marks any link that is paid, affiliate or otherwise commercial in nature. Google introduced it back in 2019 alongside rel="ugc" so that publishers could distinguish commercial links from editorial ones, rather than lumping everything together under nofollow.

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Noindex

Noindex is a directive telling search engines to keep a page out of their index. It is applied through a meta robots tag or an X-Robots-Tag header. It is useful deliberately and expensive when applied by accident to important pages.

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On-Page SEO

On-page SEO covers everything you control within a page itself: the title tag, headings, body copy, internal links, images, structured data and the URL. It is the most controllable area of search optimisation and usually the fastest one to improve.

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Open Graph

Open Graph is the tag protocol, originally created by Facebook, that controls how a URL appears when it is shared on social platforms and in messaging apps. It sets the title, description and preview image, and applies well beyond Facebook itself.

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Organic CTR Curve

The organic CTR curve describes how click-through rate falls as ranking position drops. Position one typically earns several times the clicks of position five, and page two earns almost none. The exact figures vary by query type and SERP layout.

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Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is visitors arriving from unpaid search results. It is the core metric of SEO, and unlike paid channels it compounds over time rather than stopping the moment you stop spending, which is what makes it worth the wait.

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Orphan Page

An orphan page is a page with no internal links pointing to it. Crawlers cannot reach it by following links, users cannot navigate to it, and it usually ends up unindexed or ranking far below what its content would otherwise justify.

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Outbound Link

An outbound link is one that points from your site to another website. Linking to credible sources supports your claims and helps readers verify them. Contrary to a persistent myth, linking out does not drain your rankings in any meaningful way.

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Page Speed

Page speed describes how quickly a page loads and becomes usable for a visitor. It affects conversion rates directly and rankings indirectly through Core Web Vitals. Most of the available gains come from images, server response time, render-blocking resources and third-party scripts.

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PageRank

PageRank is Google's original algorithm for scoring pages by the quantity and quality of the links pointing at them. The public toolbar score was retired in 2016, but link-derived authority remains a core part of how Google ranks pages today.

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Pagination

Pagination splits long lists across numbered pages, which is common in blog archives, category listings and search results. Handled badly it buries content at extreme crawl depth, creates near-duplicate pages and wastes a large share of your available crawl budget.

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Programmatic SEO

Programmatic SEO means generating large numbers of search-targeted pages from templates and a structured data source. Done well it captures genuine long-tail demand at scale. Done badly it produces thin, near-identical pages that trigger Google's scaled content abuse policies instead.

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QDF (Query Deserves Freshness)

Query Deserves Freshness is Google's behaviour of favouring recent content whenever a topic shows a sudden spike in public interest. It explains why news, product launches and trending subjects reshuffle their results far faster than stable evergreen queries ever do.

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Rank Tracking

Rank tracking monitors your positions for a set of target keywords over time. It is the most reported SEO metric and one of the least reliable, because results now vary by location, device, personalisation and which SERP features happen to be present.

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Reciprocal Link

A reciprocal link is an arrangement where two websites agree to link to one another. Occasional natural reciprocity is completely normal and entirely harmless. Systematic link exchanges built purely to manipulate rankings are treated by Google as a link scheme.

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Redirect (301, 302)

A redirect sends users and search engines from one URL to another. A 301 is permanent and passes ranking signals to the new URL. A 302 is temporary and tells search engines the original URL will return, so it consolidates less.

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Referring Domain

A referring domain is a unique website linking to yours at least once. It is a more meaningful measure than raw backlink count, because a hundred links from one site carry far less weight than one link each from a hundred sites.

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Responsive Design

Responsive design serves the same HTML to every device and adapts the layout with CSS. Google recommends it over separate mobile sites or dynamic serving, because one URL and one set of content removes an entire class of indexing problems.

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Rich Snippet

A rich snippet is a search result enhanced with extra detail such as star ratings, prices, availability or FAQ dropdowns. They are generated from structured data on the page and typically earn noticeably higher click-through rates than a plain listing does.

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Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a file at your domain root telling crawlers which paths they may request. It manages crawl waste effectively, but it does not remove pages from the search index and provides no security at all, since the file itself is public.

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Schema Markup

Schema markup is the shared Schema.org vocabulary you add to your HTML so that machines understand what a page describes. It powers rich results in search and gives AI systems structured facts they can extract and cite with real confidence.

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Search Console Property

A Search Console property is the site or section of a site you have verified ownership of. Domain properties cover every subdomain and protocol at once, while URL-prefix properties cover only one exact combination, which frequently splits your data unhelpfully.

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Search Intent

Search intent is what a person actually wants when they type a query into Google. Google has spent years learning to serve it, which is why matching intent matters far more than matching keywords when deciding what a page should contain.

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Search Volume

Search volume estimates how many times a term is searched per month. Every tool reports a modelled figure rather than a true count, and they disagree substantially. Treat it as a rough order of magnitude, never as a precise number.

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Semantic Search

Semantic search is the shift from matching keyword strings to understanding meaning, context and relationships between concepts. It is why a page can rank for a phrase it never uses, and why synonyms and related topics now carry real weight.

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SERP

SERP is short for search engine results page. Modern SERPs mix ads, AI overviews, featured snippets, local packs, images, videos and organic listings, which means ranking first no longer guarantees appearing anywhere near the top of what a searcher actually sees.

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Server Response Time

Server response time, measured as Time to First Byte, is how long the server takes to send the first byte after a request. Anything above 600 milliseconds caps every downstream performance metric no matter how well optimised the front end is.

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Site Architecture

Site architecture is the way your pages are organised and connected to one another. Good architecture keeps important pages within a few clicks of the homepage, groups related content logically, and makes both crawling and human navigation straightforward rather than confusing.

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Site Migration

A site migration is any change to a site's domain, URL structure, platform, protocol or design that affects how search engines see it. It is the highest-risk routine event in SEO and the most common cause of sudden traffic collapse.

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Sitelinks

Sitelinks are the additional page links that Google sometimes displays beneath your main search result, usually on branded searches. They are generated automatically from your own site structure and cannot be requested, only influenced through clear architecture and good navigation.

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Soft 404

A soft 404 is a page that returns a 200 success status while showing content indicating nothing was found, such as an empty results page or a 'page not found' message. Google detects the mismatch and treats it as an error.

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Structured Data

Structured data is machine-readable annotation describing a page's contents in a standard format, usually the Schema.org vocabulary written as JSON-LD. It is the most reliable way to state facts about your business that search engines and AI systems will trust.

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Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the discipline of making a website crawlable, indexable and fast to render. It covers crawl management, indexation, site speed, structured data, HTTPS and mobile rendering, and it forms the foundation that everything else in search is built upon.

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Thin Content

Thin content is any page that adds little value for the reader, whether it is near-empty, auto-generated, scraped or built purely to hold a keyword. At scale it drags down how search engines assess the quality of your whole site.

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Title Tag

The title tag is the HTML element defining a page's title. It appears as the clickable headline in search results and in the browser tab. It remains one of the strongest on-page relevance signals and the biggest influence on click-through rate.

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Topical Authority

Topical authority is the depth and breadth of expertise a website demonstrates on a given subject. Covering a topic and its related questions comprehensively helps every page in that cluster rank, rather than relying on individual pages competing entirely on their own.

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Toxic Backlink

A toxic backlink is one coming from a spam network, hacked site, link farm or paid placement scheme. Google usually ignores such links rather than penalising you, but dense patterns of them can still trigger a manual action against your site.

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URL Structure

URL structure is the way your web addresses are organised and formatted across the site. Short, lowercase, hyphenated paths that mirror your site hierarchy help both crawlers and real people predict what a page contains before they ever open it.

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User Agent

A user agent is the identifier that a browser or crawler sends with every request, declaring what it is. Googlebot, Bingbot and the AI crawlers each have their own. Servers can respond differently by user agent, which is where problems begin.

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User Experience Signals

User experience signals are the behavioural measures search engines may use to judge whether a result satisfied its query, including clicks, returns to search and on-page engagement. Google is deliberately vague about which of them it uses and how heavily.

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User Intent

User intent is the underlying goal behind a search query, also called search intent. The four broad categories are informational, navigational, commercial and transactional. Aligning a page with its intent is the single highest-leverage change most underperforming pages can make.

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White Hat SEO

White hat SEO means optimisation that follows the search engine guidelines: earning links honestly, building genuinely useful pages and fixing technical debt. It is slower to show results, and it does not evaporate the moment the next algorithm update lands.

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XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file listing the URLs you want indexed, along with their last-modified dates. It speeds discovery on large sites and flags fresh content, but inclusion is only a suggestion rather than a guarantee of indexing.

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YMYL (Your Money or Your Life)

YMYL describes any content that can materially affect a person's health, finances, safety or wellbeing. Google holds these pages to a higher evidence and authorship standard, and applies its quality systems far more conservatively to the topics that they cover.

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Zero-Click Search

A zero-click search is one that is resolved on the results page itself, with no click through to any website at all. Featured snippets, knowledge panels and AI overviews have made this the majority outcome for informational queries across most industries.

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