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a page that serves as an index to a group of pages that you would like the search engine spiders to find. Once a search engine spider indexes the hallway page, it should also follow all the links on that hallway page and in turn index those pages as well.
- Browse Related Terms: Agent Name, applet, Bot, Client, Crawler, GoogleBot, Hallway page, Politeness Window, Pop-up, Robot, Spider, Standards compliant, user agent, Web Crawler
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Many search engines give extra weight and importance to the text found inside HTML heading sections. It is generally considered good advice to use headings when designing web pages and to place keywords inside headings.
- Browse Related Terms: Alt Attribute, Alt tags, comment, Comments Tag, heading, Heading tag, Hidden keywords, Hidden Text, Information Architecture, Keyword prominence, Noframes tag, Optimization, Render, Title, Title tag
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An HTML tag that is often used to denote a page or section heading on a web page. Search engines pay special attention to text that is marked with a heading tag, as such text is set off from the rest of the page content as being more important.
- Browse Related Terms: Alt Attribute, Alt tags, comment, Comments Tag, heading, Heading tag, Hidden keywords, Hidden Text, Information Architecture, Keyword prominence, Noframes tag, Optimization, Render, Title, Title tag
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The heading element briefly describes the subject of the section it introduces. Heading elements go from H1 to H6 with the lower numbered headings being most important. You should only use a single H1 element on each page, and may want to use multiple other heading elements to structure a document. An H1 element source would look like: <h1>Your Topic</h1> Heading elements may be styled using CSS. Many content management systems place the same content in the main page heading and the page title, although in many cases it may be preferential to mix them up if possible. See also: W3C: Headings
- Browse Related Terms: beacon, Body copy, Clickthrough, Expandable Banner, Flash, Flash intro, Headings, Mouseover, Navigation, PDF, Shoskeles, Splash page, Title Attribute
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Keywords that are placed in the HTML source in such a way that these words are not viewable by human visitors looking at the rendered web page.
- Browse Related Terms: Alt Attribute, Alt tags, comment, Comments Tag, heading, Heading tag, Hidden keywords, Hidden Text, Information Architecture, Keyword prominence, Noframes tag, Optimization, Render, Title, Title tag
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Text on a web page which is visible to search engine spiders but not visible to human visitors. This is sometimes because the text has been set the same colour as the background, because multiple TITLE tags have been used or because the text is an HTML comment. Hidden text is often used for spamdexing. Many search engines can now detect the use of hidden text, and often remove offending pages from their database or lower such pages' positioning.
Text can also be hidden using agent name delivery or IP delivery either to present different text to different search engine spiders or to hide the real HTML source from competitors.
SEO technique used to show search engine spiders text that human visitors do not see.
While some sites may get away with it for a while, generally the risk to reward ratio is inadequate for most legitimate sites to consider using hidden text.
- Browse Related Terms: Alt Attribute, Alt tags, comment, Comments Tag, heading, Heading tag, Hidden keywords, Hidden Text, Information Architecture, Keyword prominence, Noframes tag, Optimization, Render, Title, Title tag
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Hidden Text is a SEO spam tactic to hide contextual html text from human visitors to a webpage, however making it available to search engines to spider the text. The theory is that if you place more relevant html text content on the page rich with targeted keywords, then it will assist the page gaining ranking within search engine results. Some website owners do like text content on their page because they believe it negatively affects their brand and user web experience. So, they hide the text in the hope that the page will still rank for targeted keywords. Hidden Text is an illegal technique as search engines consider it search engine spam. By undertaking this practice, it will eventually harm natural search performance of a website. Google Quality Guidelines specify to Avoid hidden text or hidden links. Yahoo!s Search Content Quality Guidelines also considers the use of text or links hidden from the user unwanted.
- Browse Related Terms: Crawl Depth, De-listing, Filter, Google Sitemaps, Hidden Text - SEO Spam Tactic, Manual Review, Page Popularity, Penalty, Quality Content, Reinclusion, Search engine marketing (SEM), Search engine optimization (SEO), SPAM
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Making a search engine believe that another website exists at your URL. Typically done using techniques such as a 302 redirect or meta refresh.
- Browse Related Terms: .htaccess, 301, 302, Absolute Link, Canonical URL, CSS, Hijacking, Meta Refresh, Redirect, Relative Link, Scraper sites, SSI
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Hijacking of websites is a practice that makes search engines believe that a specific website resides at another URL. It is a form of search engine spam and cloaking. The reason why this method is undertaken by spammers is to increase rankings in search engine result pages. Webpage Hijacking is an illegal spam tactic. When spiders crawl websites and they discover two pages with the same content, the search engine will decide which is the main url while the other is not indexed. Spammers will use tactics to ensure that their page is the one that is chosen by the search engine. An example of website hijacking is where there are two pages with exactly the same content but at different addresses company.com (the real site) and company.net (the rogue site). Spammers use tactics to ensure their site ranks above the real site.
- Browse Related Terms: Agent Name Delivery, Cgi-bin, Cloaking, Hijacking of Websites, IP Delivery, Navigation bar (nav bar), Pull-down list, Robots.txt, Spider trap, Spidering, Stealth Script, Stop character
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Algorithm which ranks results largely based on unaffiliated expert citations.
See also:
- Browse Related Terms: Age, Authorities, Authority, Co-citation, Compacted Information, Expert Document, Gateway Page, Hilltop, Hubs, Kleinberg, Jon, On-theme, Taxonomy, Teoma, Topic-Sensitive PageRank
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In the context of visitors to web pages, a hit (or site hit) is a single access request made to the server for either a text file or a graphic. If, for example, a web page contains ten buttons constructed from separate images, a single visit from someone using a web browser with graphics switched on (a "page view") will involve eleven hits on the server. (Often the accesses will not get as far as your server because the page will have been cached by a local internet service provider).
In the context of a search engine query, a hit is a measure of the number of web pages matching a query returned by a search engine or directory.
- Browse Related Terms: accessibility, cache, cookie, Google cache, HIT, HITS, HTML Source, Image Map, Invisible Web, ISP, Log file, Page View, Referrer, Site Hit, Traffic, Unique Visitor
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a download of a file from a web server. Hits do not correlate with web page visits. Every graphic on a web page counts as a hit. Thus, a single access of a web page with 20 unique graphics on it register as 21 hits - 20 for the graphics and 1 for the HTML page. Web metrics guru Jim Sterne says hits "stand for How Idiots Track Success." People who talk in terms of hits are usually either ignorant or are trying to snow their boss into thinking the website is doing better than it really is.
Link based algorithm which ranks relevancy scores based on citations from topical authorities.
See also:
- Jon Klienberg's Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment [PDF]
- Browse Related Terms: accessibility, cache, cookie, Google cache, HIT, HITS, HTML Source, Image Map, Invisible Web, ISP, Log file, Page View, Referrer, Site Hit, Traffic, Unique Visitor
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The main page on your website, which is largely responsible for helping develop your brand and setting up the navigational schemes that will be used to help users and search engines navigate your website. As far as SEO goes, a home page is typically going to be one of the easier pages to rank for some of your more competitive terms, largely because it is easy to build links at a home page. You should ensure your homepage stays focused and reinforces your brand though, and do not assume that most of your visitors will come to your site via the home page. If your site is well structured many pages on your site will likely be far more popular and rank better than your home page for relevant queries. Host (see Server)
- Browse Related Terms: Anchor text, Bait and Switch, Block Level Analysis, Breadcrumb Navigation, Conceptual Links, Google Bombing, Google Sitelinks, Home Page, Homepage, Internal Link, Internal Links, Link Baiting, Link Building, Link Reputation, Natural Language Processing, SEO, Site Map, Text Link Ads
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A homepage is the main page of a website. Like a cover of a book or the front of a store, its function is to welcome people and to inform them of the overall purpose of the website. The homepage offers an index of navigation that organizes content and leads to other parts of the website. The homepage usually accumulates the most PageRank score since its url is usually where other sites link to the most. The url of a homepage usually ends in a domain name extension such as .com, .org, .edu, etc. Other terms used to describe a homepage are front page, main web page and webserver directory index. Its interesting to note that in some countries such as Japan, Korea and Germany, the term homepage usually refers to the whole website, not just the first page. Even though the home page is designed to be the entry point of the website, people can go directly to other pages within the site without ever seeing the front page.
- Browse Related Terms: Anchor text, Bait and Switch, Block Level Analysis, Breadcrumb Navigation, Conceptual Links, Google Bombing, Google Sitelinks, Home Page, Homepage, Internal Link, Internal Links, Link Baiting, Link Building, Link Reputation, Natural Language Processing, SEO, Site Map, Text Link Ads
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Apache directory-level configuration file which can be used to password protect or redirect files.
As a note of caution, make sure you copy your current .htaccess file before editing it, and do not edit it on a site that you can't afford to have go down unless you know what you are doing.
See also:
- Browse Related Terms: .htaccess, 301, 302, Absolute Link, Canonical URL, CSS, Hijacking, Meta Refresh, Redirect, Relative Link, Scraper sites, SSI
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HyperText Markup Language - the (main) language used to write web pages.
Stands for HyperText Markup Language. The programming language used to mark up web content and display it in a formatted manner. It's up to the web browser software, e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape, to render HTML source.
HyperText Markup Language is the language in which pages on the World Wide Web are created. Some newer web pages are also formatted in XHTML. See also: W3C: HTML Home Page
- Browse Related Terms: ASP, CGI (Common Gateway Interface), Dynamic Languages, Frames, Frameset, HTML, HTTP Hypertext Markup Language, Java, Javascript, PHP, Web standards, XHTML, XML
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The raw, unrendered programming code. It can be accessed in Internet Explorer by going to the "View" menu then selecting "Source".
- Browse Related Terms: accessibility, cache, cookie, Google cache, HIT, HITS, HTML Source, Image Map, Invisible Web, ISP, Log file, Page View, Referrer, Site Hit, Traffic, Unique Visitor
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HyperText Transfer Protocol - the (main) protocol used to communicate between web servers and web browsers (clients).
HyperText Transfer Protocol is the foremost used protocol to communicate between servers and web browsers. Hypertext transfer protocol is the means by which data is transferred from its residing location on a server to an active browser.
- Browse Related Terms: Animated Ad, Cold Fusion, FTP, HTTP, Internet, Java applets, JavaScripts, Telnet, URL
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The 301 status code means the URI requested has Moved Permanently and has been assigned a new URI. Any future requests should use one of the returned URIs. It is best practice to use 301 Redirects when multiple copies of the same document reside on different URIs. This will ensure that duplicate content is removed from the site and each and every unique page will only have one URL.
- Browse Related Terms: 200, 404, AJAX, Click-down Ad or Click-within Ad, Custom error page, Error page, Fair Use, Flash Page, HTTP 301 Status Code Definition, HTTP 302 Status Code Definition, HTTP 400 Status Code Definition, HTTP 401 Status Code Definition, HTTP 403 Status Code Definition, HTTP 404 Status Code Definition, HTTP 410 Status Code Definition, HTTP 500 Status Code Definition, HTTP 501 Status Code Definition, Interstitial Ad, Open Source, Token