The process by which search engines discover web pages.
What is crawling?
This black hat technique involves showing something different to search engines than to users.
What is cloaking?
This metric represents the ratio of impressions to clicks on your URLs.
What is Click Through Rate?
An important part of a link that provides signal about the linked-to page to users and google.
What is anchor text?
A link to a webpage that appears on the same domain.
What is an internal link?
The database search engines use to store and retrieve information gathered during the crawling process.
What is the index?
Adding irrelevant keywords, or repeating keywords beyond what is natural, to a webpage in the hopes of increasing search rankings.
What is keyword stuffing?
Google uses this collection of metrics as an indicator of a site's performance and user experience.
What are the Core Web Vitals?
An XML list of pages on a website.
What is a sitemap?
An individual component which contributes to a complex series of algorithms that determine where webpages should appear with the organic search results for a specific query.
What is a ranking factor?
The page search engines display to users after conducting a search.
What is a SERP (Search Engine Results Page)?
The percent of visitors who leave a site without visiting any other pages after clicking on a search result.
What is the bounce rate?
The much-desired event when a user completes a desired action on a site (like subscribing).
What is a conversion?
A text file, accessible at the root of a website, that tells search engine crawlers which areas of a website should be ignored.
What is robots.txt?
This snippet can be added to a webpage to provide contextual information and often results in rich results.
What is structured data?
A significant change Google makes to its ranking algorithm that affects a large number of indexed web pages.
What is a Core Algorithm Update?
Any webpage that is not linked to by any other pages on that website.
What is an orphan page?
The overall “strength” of a website, built up over time, which can help a new page rank well quickly, even before that content has earned links or engagement.
What is domain authority?
One of the original innovations of Google, this algorithm measures the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages.
What is PageRank?
Navigational elements that helps users find where they are within a website.
What are breadcrumbs?
The number of URLs on a site that search engines can and want to crawl during a specific time period.
What is the Crawl Budget?
An unfortunate experience for users and crawlers where a page is redirected multiple (perhaps infinite) number of times.
What is a redirect chain?
An important measure for keywords, this metric represents the number of times a term was searched over the past year divided by 12.
What is average monthly search volume?
This status code passes all link equity from one URL to the next.
What is a 301 Redirect?
A country specific domain that indicates to users and search engines that the content on the page is relevant to that country.