Glossary

The podcast of Danny Sullivan. As of summer 2007, it runs daily Monday through Friday and lasts approximately thirty to forty-five minutes.

The original analyst in the search engine space. He founded and previously ran Search Engine Watch, and is the creator of and currently runs Search Engine Land and Sphinn.

A UK-based SEO and regular co-host on Daily SearchCast.

The ability to schedule an ad display for different times of the day, or different days of the week, in order to target a more specific audience. It is also an option that will limit the visibility of the ad based on time/date.

A link that points to a page that cannot be found, either because the page no longer exists, the page has moved and a 301 redirect was not put in place, or because the page's web server is down.

The concept in search engine optimization of linking to pages other than the site's homepage (e.g. pages "deep" in the site).

A popular social bookmarking website that allows users to tag, link, and share web pages from a centralized source.

Update: now found at Delicious.com

The removal of a website from a search engine's index, whether due to the behavior of those promoting the website or from a bug within the search engine. Also considered a Ban.

The information contained in a META tag and holds a short description of the web page that it is located on. The information in the tag is usually the sentence that is displayed directly after the main link on search engine results pages.

In paid search advertising on Google, the destination URL is actual page users see when they click through an advertiser's ad. This allows the display URL to reference the homepage while the ad directs users to a specific page.

An acronym for Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language. DHTML is a programing language used to create interactive websites. It combines the properties of several other programing languages including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

A popular social news website in which users can vote on which stories receive the most exposure. News stories, images, and videos can be submitted by users. There is also a discussion board where users can discuss the latest and most popular submissions.

The process of creating content for the purposes of getting more web traffic from Digg.com.

One of the largest and most active search engine marketing forums.

Digital Point Forums can be found at Forums.DigitalPoint.com.

A technology that stores credit cards and addresses for a consumer, and automatically gives the appropriate information to an online merchant when checking out. Several companies worked on digital wallets in the late 90's, but found a catch 22. Such technologies will not work reliably without assistance from the merchants. The merchants, however, have no incentive to help until/unless there is a large base of consumers using the technology. And consumers certainly aren't going to use the technology unless most merchants are compatible.

As a result, digital wallets all but died out during the first half of the 00 decade.

The announcement of Google Checkout has reinvigorated the idea, and perhaps given it the first real chance of success.

A website that links to other website via a system of contextual, and generally hierarchical, pages. Listings in directories may be either free or for a fee, and sometimes require a reciprocal link.

In paid search advertising on Google, the display URL is the text located under the body field. It is supposed to represent the URL of the advertisement, but can actually be customized as desired.

A network of websites or search engines and their partner sites on which paid ads can be distributed. The network receives advertisements from the host search engine.

A nickname for the Open Directory Project. DMOZ is short for Directory Mozilla.

A specific website address. For example, the domain name for the Apogee Search website is apogee-search.com. A domain name can be thought of as the location of the Web site on the internet.

Domain Squatting is a process in which users purchase cheap brand- or product-related domains for the purpose of selling at a higher price in the future. Their target tends to be larger businesses who would be willing to spend money on owning their corporate, brand, or product name. This is similar to Twitter Squatting in that there is little risk but the possibility of high profit.

The technique of purchasing large numbers of sites in order to generate material traffic from randomly or accidentally entered domain names by users. This traffic is generally monetized through Google AdSense.

The highly risky search engine optimization technique of creating hundreds or even thousands of virtually identical pages that are optimized for specific keyword variants. In many cases, these pages will automatically redirect a visitor to another page on the site that is more likely to result in a website conversion. This is one of the more common causes of the Google Death Penalty.

Also known as gateway pages, and sometimes confused with landing pages.

An open-source community management system, built around the use of news feeds and user-based code, that is becoming one of the most popular tools for creating community and social networking sites.

Drupal allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.

Pages of content, within the same website or across different domains, that are identical. While search engines do not typically penalize for duplicate content issues, they prefer to offer their users unique content. Therefore, search engines will likely choose one of the pages containing duplicate content and rank only that page; effectively “filtering out� the other pages from the search engine’s index. There are certainly exceptions to this, namely when Press Releases are submitted across different wires. Content translated into different languages is typically viewed as unique content.

Web pages generated on demand by databases or similar technology. In the past, dynamic HTML caused serious problems in indexing by the search engines. Currently, however, none of the major search engines have problems with dynamic HTML as long as the URL is not too long or containing too many variables.

The opposite of dynamic html is static HTML.

The process which allows advertisers to insert a keyword automatically into their paid search ad. Google Adwords can automatically insert the word in the advertisers' keyword list that was matched to and not the actual search term.

Web pages in which users click-through to a changeable page with content that reflects their keyword search.