Misc. SEO-related terms and phrases:

General info:

• SEO — Acronym for Search Engine Optimisation (~ Optimization). See also the Acronyms glossary.
• SE — Search Engine. A site that searches the web for web pages, based on a given query. See also the Search Engines glossary.


• Ban — The removal of a site's pages from a search engine's database, probably because they didn't obey that SE's Terms Of Service.
• Everflux — The fact that the SERPS (especially Google's) are updated constantly, resulting in slight changes in the ranking of certain pages. These changes were servere and periodical before (see Google Dance).
• Google Dance — Phenomenon showing pages' rankings to jump up and down during an update of the various Google datacenters. It can still be witnessed during Google's backlinks and pagerank updates, but the effect is less noticeable now that Google updates its serps more frequently (see also Everflux).
• Hilltop algorithm — Theory that sites/pages deserve a higher ranking if links to them are found on "expert" sites, whichever these are. It is believed that Google's Site-Flavored Search marks expert sites for each query with "bubbles".
• Oblivion Drop —
• Penalty — A drop in rankings, inflicted on pages that do not conform to the search engines' rules or guidelines. Light offenses often result in minor penalties, whereas heavy violations of a SE's laws can lead to a complete ban.
• Sandbox — Theory that Google is ranking new sites lower, to combat quick and dirty SEO tricks. It could – however – also be a symptom of poor optimisation, stiff competition or penalties for using questionable site promotion techniques.
• Validation — Method to check if your (HTML) code is readable by most browsers. A page with valid code is expected to cause little or no mistakes when read by either human visitors or robots. See also the W3C button on the bottom of this site's pages.

SEO styles and techniques – fair and evil:

• Backlink, Inbound Link — A link from another page pointing to yours. These can be divided into Internal backlinks (i.e. links from your own pages) and Inbound Links (coming from other sites). Every backlink to your page is considered to be a sign of relevance and quality.
• Black hat vs. White hat (and grey hat) —
• Bork bork bork trick — alternative method to get your pages listed quickly on Google's results pages. This only to illustrate that there ARE NO quick fixes.
• Breadcrumbs —
• Cloaking, IP delivery —
• E-mail harvesting —
• Fresh content —
• .htaccess —
• Link building —
• Link exchange —
• Link farm —
• Mod_rewrite —
• Redirect —
• Site map, sitemap —
• Sitewide or run-of-site link —
• Spam, spamming —
• Trackback — Method, used by one blogger to automatically notify another about his/her new entry relating to theirs. Usually, this will produce a link back to the referring blog – spontaneously.