SEO Glossary A–Z

An A–Z glossary of link building and SEO terms, defined in plain English.

Every link building and SEO term we use in proposals, audits and reports — defined in plain English and listed A to Z. There are 171 entries; use the index to jump to a letter.

#

301 Redirect: A permanent redirect. It sends visitors and search engines to a new URL and passes the great majority of ranking signals along with them.
302 Redirect: A temporary redirect. Use it only when the original URL will genuinely return; leaving one in place for months invites indexing confusion.
404 Error: The server response for a page that does not exist. A few are normal; hundreds of linked 404s waste crawl budget and lose link value.
410 Gone: A stronger signal than 404 that a page was deliberately removed and will not return, so search engines drop it faster.

A

Above the Fold: The part of a page visible before scrolling. What sits here disproportionately drives engagement and conversion.
Accelerated Mobile Pages: A stripped-back HTML framework for fast mobile pages. No longer required for top stories placement, and rarely worth new investment.
AI Overview: A generated summary Google places above traditional results. Being cited inside one depends on clear, quotable, well-sourced content.
Alt Text: A written description of an image used by screen readers and image search. Describe the image, do not stuff keywords.
Anchor Text: The clickable words in a link. They tell search engines what the destination page is about.
API: An interface that lets software pull data from another service, such as fetching rankings or backlinks programmatically.
Authority: A loose term for how much trust a site has earned, usually estimated from the quality and quantity of its backlinks.

B

Backlink: A link from another website to yours. Still one of the strongest ranking signals when it is editorially given.
Black Hat SEO: Tactics that break search engine guidelines — private blog networks, cloaking, hacked links. Fast gains, high risk of penalties.
Blogger Outreach: Contacting real site owners to earn a mention or link based on the value of your content or product.
Bounce Rate: The share of sessions with no further interaction. Useful as a trend, not as a ranking factor.
Branded Anchor: Anchor text that uses your brand name. It is the safest and most natural anchor type in any healthy link profile.
Breadcrumb: A navigational trail showing the page hierarchy. Helps users and can appear in search results.
Broken Link: A link pointing to a URL that returns an error. Fixing them recovers lost link equity and improves user experience.
Broken Link Building: Finding dead pages other sites link to and offering your working resource as a replacement.

C

Cache: A stored copy of a page or asset served to speed up delivery.
Cannibalisation: Two of your own pages competing for one query, so neither builds enough authority to win it.
Canonical Tag: Markup that declares the preferred version of duplicate or near-duplicate pages.
Citation: A mention of your business name, address and phone number on a directory or local site. Consistency matters more than volume.
Click-Through Rate: Clicks divided by impressions. Titles, descriptions and rich results all move it.
Cloaking: Showing search engines different content than users see. A direct guideline violation.
Co-Citation: Being mentioned alongside the same brands or topics repeatedly, which helps establish what you are associated with.
Content Audit: A systematic review of every page to decide what to keep, improve, merge or remove.
Content Decay: The gradual traffic loss an unmaintained page suffers as competitors publish fresher, deeper coverage.
Content Gap: Topics or queries competitors cover and you do not — usually the fastest route to new traffic.
Content Hub: A pillar page plus tightly linked supporting articles that together demonstrate depth on one subject.
Contextual Link: A link placed inside body copy rather than in a footer, sidebar or author bio. Worth considerably more.
Conversion Rate: The share of visitors who complete the action you care about, such as a form submission or purchase.
Core Update: A broad change to Google's ranking systems. Recoveries come from genuine quality improvements, not quick tweaks.
Core Web Vitals: Google's measurements of loading (LCP), interaction responsiveness (INP) and layout stability (CLS).
Crawl Budget: How much of your site a search engine will fetch in a given period. Matters mostly on large sites.
Crawl Depth: How many clicks from the homepage a page sits. Important pages should be within three.
Crawl Error: A failure a crawler hit when requesting a URL — server error, timeout or blocked resource.
Crawler: A bot that follows links to discover and download pages, such as Googlebot or Bingbot.
CSS: The styling layer of a page. Blocking it from crawlers stops Google rendering the page as users see it.
Cumulative Layout Shift: A Core Web Vital measuring how much the layout jumps while loading. Reserve space for images and ads.

D

Deindexing: A page or site being removed from the search index, whether deliberately or as a consequence of a penalty.
Digital PR: Earning coverage and links in the press through stories, data and expert commentary.
Directory Link: A listing in a categorised index. Valuable only from genuine, curated, industry-relevant directories.
Disavow File: A list of domains you ask Google to ignore. Rarely needed now, and easy to misuse.
Dofollow: A normal link with no rel attribute limiting endorsement, so it can pass ranking signals.
DOM: The rendered structure of a page after HTML, CSS and JavaScript have been processed. What Google actually indexes.
Domain Authority: Moz's 0–100 estimate of a domain's ranking strength. A comparative tool, not a Google metric.
Domain Rating: Ahrefs' 0–100 estimate of backlink profile strength. Useful for screening prospects.
Doorway Page: A thin page built only to capture a query and funnel users elsewhere. A guideline violation.
Duplicate Content: Substantially identical content on multiple URLs. Resolve with canonicals, redirects or consolidation.
Dwell Time: How long a searcher stays before returning to the results. Not a confirmed ranking factor, but a good quality proxy.

E

E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust — the quality framework Google's raters use to judge content.
Editorial Link: A link a publisher chose to give because your page was worth citing. The type that holds value long term.
Entity: A person, place, organisation or concept search engines understand as a distinct thing, not just a keyword string.
Exact Match Anchor: Anchor text identical to the target keyword. Effective in moderation, a footprint when overused.

F

Faceted Navigation: Filter and sort parameters on category pages. Left uncontrolled they generate thousands of duplicate URLs.
Featured Snippet: A short answer lifted to the top of the results. Won by answering the question directly in clear, structured copy.
First Contentful Paint: How long until the browser renders the first piece of content.
Footprint: A repeated pattern across links or sites that makes a scheme detectable — same templates, hosts or anchor mixes.

G

Google Business Profile: The listing that powers your presence in maps and local packs. Central to local SEO.
Google Search Console: Google's free reporting on impressions, clicks, indexing and technical issues for your verified site.
Guest Post: An article you write for another publication. Legitimate when the audience is real and the content earns its place.
Guidelines: Google's published rules on spam and quality. The line between aggressive and reckless SEO.

H

H1: The main heading of a page. Use one, and make it match search intent.
Heading Hierarchy: Logical use of H1 to H6 so both users and crawlers can follow the structure of a page.
Hreflang: Markup that tells search engines which language and region version of a page to serve.
HTTP Status Code: The server's numeric response — 200 fine, 301 moved permanently, 404 missing, 500 server error.
HTTPS: Encrypted delivery. A lightweight ranking signal and a baseline trust requirement.

I

Impression: One appearance of your page in a set of search results.
Index: The searchable database of pages a search engine has crawled and judged worth storing.
Index Bloat: Large numbers of thin, duplicate or parameter URLs in the index, diluting crawl attention.
Indexation: Whether a page is stored in the index and therefore eligible to rank at all.
Information Architecture: How pages are grouped and linked so importance and relationships are obvious.
Interaction to Next Paint: The Core Web Vital measuring responsiveness to user input; it replaced First Input Delay.
Internal Link: A link between pages on your own site. The cheapest, most controllable ranking lever you have.

J

JavaScript SEO: Making sure content rendered by JavaScript is still crawlable, indexable and fast.
JSON-LD: The recommended format for structured data, added as a script block rather than inline attributes.

K

Keyword: The word or phrase a person types or speaks into a search engine.
Keyword Cannibalisation: See Cannibalisation — multiple pages fighting over one query.
Keyword Density: How often a term appears relative to total words. A diagnostic for over-optimisation, not a target to hit.
Keyword Difficulty: A tool estimate of how hard it will be to rank for a term, usually based on the links of current top pages.
Keyword Mapping: Assigning one primary query to one page so effort and internal links do not compete.
Keyword Stuffing: Repeating a term unnaturally to manipulate rankings. Actively harmful.
Knowledge Panel: The entity summary box beside results, built from what search engines know about a brand or person.

L

Landing Page: The page a visitor arrives on, usually built around one intent and one action.
Largest Contentful Paint: A Core Web Vital measuring when the biggest visible element finishes rendering. Aim under 2.5 seconds.
Lazy Loading: Deferring off-screen images and media until needed. Speeds up first load when implemented crawl-safely.
Link Bait: An asset created specifically to earn links — original data, a free tool, a strong opinion piece.
Link Building: The practice of earning links from other sites to increase authority and rankings.
Link Equity: The ranking value passed through a link, once known as PageRank or link juice.
Link Exchange: Two sites agreeing to link to each other. At scale it becomes a detectable scheme.
Link Farm: A network of sites created purely to link out. Worthless at best, penalty bait at worst.
Link Gap: Domains linking to several competitors but not to you — the highest-probability outreach list you can build.
Link Insertion: Adding a link into an existing published article. Also called a niche edit or curated link.
Link Profile: The complete picture of your backlinks: sources, anchors, topics and growth over time.
Link Reclamation: Recovering value from broken, redirected or unlinked mentions of your brand.
Link Velocity: How quickly new links appear. Steady growth reads as natural; sharp spikes do not.
Local Pack: The map plus three business listings shown for local intent queries.
Log File Analysis: Reading server logs to see exactly what crawlers requested, how often and with what response.
Long-Tail Keyword: A longer, more specific query with lower volume and usually much clearer intent.

M

Meta Description: The summary snippet in the HTML head. It does not rank pages but strongly influences click-through.
Meta Robots Tag: Page-level instructions such as noindex or nofollow given to crawlers.
Mobile-First Indexing: Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Content hidden on mobile effectively does not exist.

N

Navigational Query: A search for a specific brand or site, such as a company name plus login.
Niche Edit: A link added to an existing, already-indexed article on a relevant site.
Nofollow: A rel attribute telling search engines not to pass endorsement through the link.
Noindex: A directive keeping a page out of the search index while still allowing users to visit it.

O

Off-Page SEO: Everything influencing rankings from outside your site: links, mentions, reviews, brand strength.
On-Page SEO: Optimising the content and HTML of a page — titles, headings, copy, internal links, markup.
Open Graph: Meta tags controlling how a URL previews when shared on social platforms.
Organic Traffic: Visits from unpaid search results.
Orphan Page: A page no internal link points to, so crawlers and users struggle to find it.
Outbound Link: A link from your page to another site. Citing good sources helps credibility.
Outreach: Contacting site owners, editors and journalists to earn coverage, links or partnerships.

P

Page Speed: How quickly a page loads and becomes usable. Affects both rankings and conversion.
PageRank: Google's original link-based scoring algorithm. No longer public, still conceptually alive.
Pagination: Splitting a long list across numbered pages. Keep the sequence crawlable and self-canonical.
Parasite SEO: Ranking content on someone else's high-authority domain. Effective, borrowed and unstable.
Penalty: A manual action or algorithmic suppression applied for guideline violations.
People Also Ask: The expandable related-question block in the results — a strong source of subheading ideas.
Pillar Page: The comprehensive central page of a topic cluster, supported by linked detail articles.
Private Blog Network: Sites owned or controlled solely to build links. A textbook black-hat tactic.
Programmatic SEO: Generating many templated pages from structured data. Works only when each page is genuinely useful.

R

Rank Tracking: Monitoring your positions for target queries across locations and devices.
Reciprocal Link: Mutual links between two sites. Fine occasionally, a pattern when systematic.
Redirect: Sending a request for one URL to another.
Redirect Chain: Two or more redirects between the requested URL and the final page. Collapse them to one hop.
Redirect Loop: Redirects pointing back at each other so the page never resolves.
Referring Domain: One unique website linking to you, however many individual links it sends.
Rel Canonical: See Canonical Tag.
Rel Sponsored: The rel value marking paid or sponsored links, required by Google's guidelines.
Rel UGC: The rel value marking user-generated links such as comments and forum posts.
Render Blocking: CSS or JavaScript that delays the browser from painting visible content.
Rich Result: A search result enhanced by structured data — reviews, FAQs, recipes, products.
Robots.txt: A root file telling crawlers which paths they may request. It controls crawling, not indexing.

S

Schema Markup: Standardised vocabulary describing your content to machines, usually implemented as JSON-LD.
Search Intent: What the searcher actually wants: to learn, compare, navigate or buy.
Search Volume: The estimated number of monthly searches for a query.
SERP: Search engine results page — everything shown for a query, ads and features included.
SERP Feature: Any non-standard result block: AI overviews, snippets, video carousels, map packs.
Server Log: The raw record of every request your server handled, crawlers included.
Server-Side Rendering: Producing full HTML on the server so content is present without executing JavaScript.
Session: One continuous visit by a user, ending after inactivity or a defined timeout.
Sitemap: An XML list of the URLs you want crawled and indexed, referenced from robots.txt.
Sitewide Link: A link repeated on every page, usually in a header, footer or sidebar. Counted roughly once.
Skyscraper Technique: Finding a heavily linked page, publishing something clearly better, then pitching it to those linkers.
Soft 404: A page returning 200 but showing no real content, so search engines treat it as missing.
Spam Score: A third-party estimate of how risky a domain looks. Screening input, never a verdict on its own.
Structured Data: Machine-readable markup describing your page, which can unlock rich results.
Subdomain: A separate hostname such as blog.example.com. Treated as related but partly distinct.
Subfolder: A path such as example.com/blog. Usually the better choice for consolidating authority.

T

Tail Query: A low-volume, highly specific search that often converts far better than a head term.
Technical SEO: Work on crawling, indexing, rendering, speed and site structure rather than copy.
Thin Content: Pages with little original value, whether auto-generated, scraped or simply padded out.
Title Tag: The clickable headline in search results. Front-load the primary term and stay under about 60 characters.
Topical Authority: Demonstrated depth and credibility across one subject area rather than scattered coverage.
Topical Relevance: How closely a linking site's subject matter matches yours. Often worth more than a higher authority score.
Toxic Backlink: A link from a spammy or manipulative source. Usually best ignored rather than disavowed.
Traffic Value: What your organic traffic would cost to buy through ads. A useful way to express SEO ROI.
Trust Flow: Majestic's estimate of link quality based on proximity to trusted seed sites.

U

Unlinked Mention: Your brand named without a link. The easiest outreach win available.
URL Slug: The readable part of a URL after the domain. Keep it short, lowercase and descriptive.
User Experience: How easily and pleasantly a visitor completes what they came to do.
User-Generated Content: Reviews, comments and forum posts contributed by your audience.

V

Vertical Search: Search restricted to one content type such as images, video, news or shopping.
Viewport: The visible area of a page on a given device; the meta viewport tag makes layouts responsive.

W

Web Vitals: The broader set of Google performance metrics, of which Core Web Vitals are the headline three.
White Hat SEO: Tactics that comply with search engine guidelines and hold their value over time.
White-Label SEO: Services delivered under an agency partner's brand rather than the provider's.

X

XML Sitemap: See Sitemap.

Z

Zero-Click Search: A search answered directly on the results page, so no site receives a visit.

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