Digital Glossary

Redirects the web browser to a different location and passes all page authority from the previous page to the new page. It also tells browsers and search engines that a web page or site has been permanently moved to a new location, and includes the address to which the resource has been moved.
301 is also an HTTP status code which signifies that the web page a user is trying to reach has been permanently changed to another page.

Redirects the web browser to a different location but does not pass any page authority. It's also considered as a method of redirecting a visitor from one page to another web page, used for temporary situations only. For permanent redirects, instead use a 301.
302 is also an HTTP status code which indicates that the web page a user is trying to reach has been temporarily moved.

The error message that appears when a visitor tries to go to a web page that does not exist or when a resource does not exist it turns this error code. 404 is also an HTTP status code which signifies that the web page a user is looking for could not be found on the website’s server.

Text added to images to help search engines understand what the images are about and how they relate to the content on the page. Alt text also can be read aloud by a screen reader for blind users. It's also known as an attribute added to HTML code for images, used to provide vision impaired website visitors with information about the contents of a picture.

Best practice dictates that all images on a website should have alt text, and that the text should be descriptive of the image.

The clickable words in a hyperlink. In SEO, anchor text is a ranking signal to Google, as it provides context about the destination site. For example, if many websites link to one particular website using the anchor text “free stock photos”, Google uses that information to understand the destination site is likely a resource with free stock photos. Theoretically, that could help the stock photos website rank in Google for keywords related to stock photography.

It's also considered The actual text of a link to a web page. On most websites, this text is usually dark blue and underlined, or purple if you’ve visited the link in the past. Anchor text helps search engines understand what the destination page is about; it describes what you will see if you click through.

A branch of digital marketing focused on strategies and techniques designed to improve visibility of apps in the app store. This can include optimizing the apps meta data with targeted keywords, enhancing app creatives, and more.

Refers to the average position that an ad appears in search results when that keyword is searched. For example, an average position of 1.4 means that an ad usually appears between the 1st and 2rd positions.

An automated program that visits websites, sometimes also referred to as a “crawler” or a “spider”. Search Engines like Google uses bots to crawl websites so that they can be ranked and added to search indexes. Spam bots visit websites for nefarious reasons, often showing in Google Analytics as spammy traffic.

Links at the top of a web page or in a search result, that better help the user navigate the site. Onsite links often appear near the web page’s title and look something like this: Home > Services > Specific Service.

Breadcrumbs can also be found in search results through specific schema markups. These help users find related pages from the search result listing.

in other words, It's an element on a page or SERP result that shows the navigational trail a user took or could take to reach the page they are on. On a webpage, the trail is a series of links to other pages and is most often located at the top of the page. Example: Home / Shop / Backpacks

This is when one website hyperlinks to another website using html href code. Backlinks are a major factor used by Google in determining organic rankings. The basic idea being that if “website A” has incoming backlinks from other strong/relevant websites (websites B, C, and D), the links are votes of trust for website A. Website A will then gain authority from B, C, and D through those backlinks, which generally results in better rankings and a source of potential referral traffic.

This can sometimes be referred to as an “Inbound link.” A backlink is almost a cross-reference of sorts – search engines see it as a good indicator of how popular a site is because of how many other sites are linking to it.

This is a link that directs users from another website to your page and is a part of SEO Linkbuilding. It's an incoming line from an external website to another website. Collecting quality backlinks is one of the facets of search engine optimization (SEO), as they are one of the determining factors of a page’s relevancy, popularity, and/or importance.

unethical techniques used to increase a site’s search engine ranking that violate search engine guidelines. Examples of techniques that would be classified as ‘black hat’ include – keyword stuffing, using white text on white background (so that keywords are invisible) and adding unrelated keywords to content. Google will penalise websites using such practices.

An HTML element that is used to avoid duplicate content problems by telling search engines which page of content is the preferred version.

It also can be explained as a piece of code that is added into the html head of a webpage to indicate to Google whether a piece of content is original or duplicated from somewhere else. Original content should canonical to itself, and content taken from other places should point the canonical to the original source URL. Canonicals can also be used to avoid duplicate content issues within a website.

A type of Black Hat SEO in which a website delivers different content to the search engine than it delivers to users.

Content syndication is a strategy where you allow other websites to republish your content, such as articles or blogs. These websites might choose to republish your content in its entirety, or they might just use an excerpt. Regardless, the republishing site should always credit you, the original creator, usually with a link. Typically, the attribution might say something like: 'This article was originally published on [your name/domain].' The primary goal of content syndication is to help you reach a larger and new audience.

A set of page experience signals which are being incorporated into Google’s search ranking algorithm as a known ranking factor. Core Web Vitals include measurements of a website’s Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

An automated program that scans websites to determine their content and purpose. The name reflects how the software “crawls” through the code, which is why they are sometimes also referred to as “spiders”. Crawlers are used by Google to find new content and to evaluate the quality of webpages for their index. Webmasters and SEOs can request additional scans through Google Search Console.

It's a program designed to browse and read the web by following hyperlinks. Search engines use the information a crawler finds to build an index.

A website that categorically lists websites with similar themes. Some directories like chambers of commerce (a list of businesses in one geographic area) can be helpful for SEO, however widespread abuse of spam directories led Google to discount links from directories whose sole purpose was selling links.

Just like directories for people and phone numbers, there are directories for websites. Submitting your site to a directory gives you more than just an inbound link; it helps people find you.

A phrase that denotes a hyperlink absent of a “nofollow” tag. By default, a hyperlink is a dofollow link until a “nofollow” piece of code is added to it. Dofollow links pass SEO equity to the destination URL, while “nofollow” links do not.

The main web address of your site (i.e. www.yoursite.com). It’s good to renew ownership of your domain for several years. Search engine rankings favor websites with longer registrations because it shows commitment.

a search engine ranking factor used to measure the power of a domain name based on Age, Popularity, Size and other Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) factors. This measurement (scored between 1 – 100) represents how much authority a domain has, to help decide where it should appear in search results and indicating how good your entire domain is. It is calculated by the quantity of links to your site, the quality of those links, and the quantity and quality of those links.

Refers to instances where portions of text are found in at least two different places on the web. When the same content is found on multiple websites, it can cause ranking issues for one or all of the websites, as Google does not want to show multiple websites in search results that have the exact same information.

Generally, the site that indexed the content first is considered to be the original content and would not be penalized.

Duplicate content can result from plagiarism, automated content scrapers, or lazy web design. Duplicate content can also be a problem within one website — if multiple versions of a page exists, Google may not understand which version to show in search results, and the pages are competing against each other, this is also known as keyword cannibalization.

Issues like this can occur when new versions of pages are added, without deleting or forwarding the old version, or through poor URL structures.

The amount of time between when a user clicks on a result on the search engine results page and when the user returns to the search engine results page.

Dwell time refers to the amount of time a user spends on a website or a particular page before returning to the search results page or navigating to another site. In other words, it measures the length of time a user engages with a website or page after clicking on a search result.
A longer dwell time indicates that users are finding the content on a website valuable and are engaging with it, while a shorter dwell time suggests that the content may not be meeting user expectations or providing a positive user experience.
Search engines like Google use dwell time as a ranking factor because it is an indicator of the quality and relevance of a website's content.

In SEO, "demoting" means that a search engine like Google has lowered a website's position in its search results. This can happen because of changes in the search engine's ranking algorithms or because other pages have become more relevant.

In SEO "Devaluing" is when specific elements of a webpage, like certain types of backlinks, are deemed less important by a search engine. These elements don't boost a page's ranking as much as they used to, but they're not necessarily harmful.