Search definitions beginning with M

Machine-generated - permalink - collapse

All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing

Don't use software tools that purport to auto-generate doorway pages. These pages are usually devoid of meaningful content. Google, in particular, is working on ways to identify and exclude machine-generated doorway pages.
SEO Glossary.com - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Analytics, Brin, Sergey, Google, Google Analytics, Google cache, Google Pack, Googleware

Malda, Rob - permalink - collapse

All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing

Founder of Slashdot.org, a popular editorially driven technology news forum.
SEO Book - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Brand, Forums, Slashdot, Yahoo! Answers

Manual Review - permalink - collapse

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All major search engines combine a manual review process with their automated relevancy algorithms to help catch search spam and train their relevancy algorithms. Abnormal usage data or link growth patterns may also flag sites for manual review.

See also:
- Inktomi Spam Database Left Open to Public - article about Inktomi's spam database from 2001
- Search Bistro - links to Google's General Guidelines on Random Query Evaluation [PDF] and Google's Spam Guide for Raters
- Google Image Labeler - example of how humans can be used to review content
SEO Book - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Organic Search Results, Relevancy, Search History, TrustRank, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Directory

Manual submitting - permalink - collapse

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Submitting by hand to an individual search engine, rather than using an automated submission tool or service. Manual submitting is the more polite way to submit, and as such is less likely to land you in trouble with the search engines. But the best approach is not to submit at all and let the search engine spiders find your site through links from other sites to your site.
SEO Glossary.com - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: announce site to search engines, Announcing, Automated Submitting, Bulk submission services, Deep submitting, Resubmitting, Submission Service, Submitting

masking character - permalink - collapse

All > Technology > Search > Enterprise Search

A character that is used to represent optional characters at the front, middle, and end of a search term. Masking characters are normally used for finding variations of a term in an index. See also wildcard character.
IBM - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: character normalization, escape character, ligature, newline character, trailing character, Wildcard, wildcard character

Mechanical Turk - permalink - collapse

All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing

Amazon.com program which allows you to hire humans to perform easy tasks that computers are bad at.

See also:
- Mechanical Turk
- Google Image Labeler - image labeling game
- Human Computation Speech Video at Google
SEO Book - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Alexa, Arbitrage, Business.com, Button, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Landing Page Quality Scores, Profit Elasticity, ROI

Meme - permalink - collapse

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In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins defines a meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." Many people use the word meme to refer to self spreading or viral ideas. See also: Techmeme - meme tracker which shows technology ideas that are currently spreading on popular technology blogs
SEO Book - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Battelle, John, Gladwell, Malcolm, Godin, Seth, Seth Godin, Squidoo, Viral Marketing

Metadata - permalink - collapse

All > Technology > Search > Enterprise Search

Metadata is often described as "data about data". It typically augments the full text of a document to help with recall, precision, creating filters, and working with navigators.
FAST - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Contextual Insight, Deep navigators, Dynamic drill-down, Navigation, Navigators, Result-side (shallow) navigators, Results-based binning, Results clustering, Results transformation, Search Profile

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All > Law > E-Discovery
All > Technology > Collaboration > SharePoint
All > Technology > E-mail > Lotus Domino
All > Technology > E-mail > Microsoft Email > Microsoft Exchange > Microsoft Exchange 2000
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Meta Description - permalink - collapse

All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing

a meta tag hidden in the HTML that describes the page's content. Should be relatively short; around 12 to 20 words is suggested. The meta description provides an opportunity to influence how your Web page is described in the search results, but it will not improve your search rankings. Make sure your meta description reflects the page content or you may be accused of spamming.
SEO Glossary.com - Cite This Source - This Definition
The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two of content which describes the content of the page. A good meta description tag should: be relevant and unique to the page; reinforce the page title; and focus on including offers and secondary keywords and phrases to help add context to the page title. Relevant meta description tags may appear in search results as part of the page description below the page title. The code for a meta description tag looks like this <meta name="Description" content="Your meta description here. " / > See also: Free meta tag generator - offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.
SEO Book - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Alt tags, comment, Comments Tag, description, Meta Keywords, Meta tag, Meta tag stuffing, Meta Tags, Multiple Keyword Tags, Noframes tag, Refresh Tag, Tagging, tags (see Bookmarks)

Meta Keywords - permalink - collapse

All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing

a meta tag hidden in the HTML that lists keywords relevant to the page's content. Because search engine spammers have abused this tag so much, this tag provides little to no benefit to your search rankings. Of the major search engines, only Yahoo! still pays any attention to the meta keywords tag.
SEO Glossary.com - Cite This Source - This Definition
The meta keywords tag is a tag which can be used to highlight keywords and keyword phrases which the page is targeting. The code for a meta keyword tag looks like this <meta name="Keywords" content="keyword phrase, another keyword, yep another, maybe one more "> Many people spammed meta keyword tags and searchers typically never see the tag, so most search engines do not place much (if any) weight on it. Many SEO professionals no longer use meta keywords tags. See also: Free meta tag generator - offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.
SEO Book - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Alt tags, comment, Comments Tag, description, Meta Description, Meta tag, Meta tag stuffing, Meta Tags, Multiple Keyword Tags, Noframes tag, Refresh Tag, Tagging, tags (see Bookmarks)

Meta Refresh - permalink - collapse

All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing

A meta tag used to make a browser refresh to another URL location. A meta refresh looks like this <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;url=http://www.site.com/folder/page.htm"> Generally in most cases it is preferred to use a 301 or 302 redirect over a meta refresh.
SEO Book - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: 301, 302, Clickthrough, Hijacking, .htaccess, Redirect, Scraper sites

Meta Search - permalink - collapse

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Search results derived from several sources and consolidated into a single SERP.
SEO Glossary.com - Cite This Source - This Definition
A search engine which pulls top ranked results from multiple other search engines and rearranges them into a new result set.

SEO Book - Cite This Source - This Definition
A search of searches. A query is submitted to more than one search engine or directory, and results are reported from all the engines, possibly after removal of duplicates and sorting.
I-Search Digest - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Miserable Failure, Negative SEO, Results, Search Engine Results Page (SERP), SERP, SERPs

Meta Search Engine - permalink - collapse

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A server which passes queries on to many search engines and/or directories and then summarises all the results.
I-Search Digest - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Algorithm, Directory, Hilltop, Natural Language Processing, Positioning, Positioning Technique, Relevancy Algorithm, Reputation Management, Search Engine

Meta tag - permalink - collapse

All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing

A construct placed in the HTML header of a web page, providing information which is not visible to browsers. The most common meta tags (and those most relevant to search engines) are KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION.

The KEYWORDS tag allows the author to emphasise the importance of certain words and phrases used within the page. Some search engines will respond to this information - others will ignore it. Don't use quotes around the keywords or keyphrases.

The DESCRIPTION tag allows the author to control the text of the summary displayed when the page appears in the results of a search. Again, some search engines will ignore this information.

The HTTP-EQUIV meta tag is used to issue HTTP commands, and is frequently used with the REFRESH tag to refresh page content after a given number of seconds. Gateway pages sometimes use this technique to force browsers to a different page or site. Most search engines are wise to this, and will index the final page and/or reduce the ranking. Infoseek has a strong policy against this technique, and they might penalize your site, or even ban it.

Other common meta tags are GENERATOR (usually advertising the software used to generate the page) and AUTHOR (used to credit the author of the page, and often containing e-mail address, homepage URL and other information).

I-Search Digest - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Alt tags, comment, Comments Tag, description, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Meta tag stuffing, Meta Tags, Multiple Keyword Tags, Noframes tag, Refresh Tag, Tagging, tags (see Bookmarks)

Meta Tags - permalink - collapse

All > Technology > Search > SEO / Search Marketing

Meta-information (information about information) that is associated with a web page and placed in the HTML but not displayed on the page for the user to see. There are a range of meta tags, only a few of which are relevant to search engine spiders. Two of the most well-known meta tags are the meta description and meta keywords; unfortunately these are ignored by most major search engines, including Google.
SEO Glossary.com - Cite This Source - This Definition
People generally refer to meta descriptions and meta keywords as meta tags. Some people also group the page title in with these. The page title is highly important. The meta description tag is somewhat important. The meta keywords tag is not that important.
SEO Book - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Alt tags, comment, Comments Tag, description, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, Meta tag, Meta tag stuffing, Multiple Keyword Tags, Noframes tag, Refresh Tag, Tagging, tags (see Bookmarks)

An Internet standard for identifying the type of object that is being transferred across the Internet.
IBM - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: crawl space, Document Object Model, File Traverser, seed URL, XML searching, XPath (XML Path Language)

Mindshare - permalink - collapse

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A measure of the amount of people who think of you or your product when thinking of products in your category. Sites with strong mindshare, top rankings, or a strong memorable brand are far more likely to be linked at than sites which are less memorable and have less search exposure. The link quality of mindshare related links most likely exceeds the quality of the average link on the web. If you sell non-commodities, personal recommendations also typically carry far greater weight than search rankings alone. See also: Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] - Mike Grehan article about how top rankings are self reinforcing
SEO Book - Cite This Source - This Definition
Browse Related Terms: Inlinks, Link bait, Link Baiting, Link Building, Link Bursts, Link Churn, Link Popularity