SEO Glossary | Chapter 6

Directory links

"Directory" in the context of local SEO is an aggregate list of local businesses, usually including each business's name, address, phone number (NAP) and other information like their website. "Directory" can also refer to a type of unnatural link that violates Google's guidelines: "low-quality directory or bookmark site links."

DA

Domain Authority (DA) is a Moz metric used to predict a domain's ranking ability; best used as a comparative metric (ex: comparing a website's DA score to that of its direct competitors).

NoFollow

Links marked up with rel="nofollow" do not pass PageRank. Google encourages the use of these in some situations, like when a link has been paid for.

Linked unstructured citations

References to a business' complete or partial contact information on a non-directory platform (like online news, blogs, best-of lists, etc.)

Amplification

Sharing or spreading the word about your brand; often used in the context of social media, paid advertisements, and influencer marketing.

PA

Similar to DA, Page Authority (PA) predicts an individual page's ranking ability.

Google search operators

Special text that can be appended to your query to further specify what types of results you're looking for. For example, adding "site:" before a domain name can return a list of all (or many) indexed pages on said domain.

Follow

The default state of a link, "follow" links pass PageRank

Deindexed

When a URL, section of URLs, or an entire domain has been removed from a search engine index. This can happen for a number of reasons, such as when a website receives a manual penalty for violating Google's quality guidelines.

Editorial links

When links are earned naturally and given out of an author's own volition (rather than paid for or coerced), they are considered editorial.

Qualified traffic

When traffic is "qualified," it usually means that the visit is relevant to the intended topic of the page, and therefore the visitor is more likely to find the content useful and convert.

Spam Score

A Moz metric used to quantify a domain's relative risk of penalization by using a series of flags that are highly correlated with penalized sites.

Google Analytics

A free (with an option to pay for upgraded features) tool that helps website owners get insight into how people are engaging with their website. Some examples of reports you can see in Google Analytics include acquisition reports that show what channels your visitors are coming from, and conversion reports that show the rate at which people are completing goals (ex: form fills) on your website.

MozBar

A plugin available for the Chrome browser that allows you to easily view metrics for the selected page, like DA, PA, title tag, and more.

Link profile

A term used to describe all the inbound links to a select domain, subdomain, or URL.

Link exchange

Also known as reciprocal linking, link exchanges involve "you link to me and I'll link to you" tactics. Excessive link exchanges are a violation of Google's quality guidelines.

10x content

Coined by Rand Fishkin to describe content that is "10x better" than anything else on the web for that same topic.

Resource pages

Commonly used for the purpose of link building, resource pages typically contain a list of helpful links to other websites. If your business sells email marketing software, for example, you could look up marketing intitle:"resources" and reach out to the owners of said sites to see if they would include a link to your website on their page.

Purchased links

Exchanging money, or something else of value, for a link. If a link is purchased, it constitutes an advertisement and should be treated with a nofollow tag so that it does not pass PageRank.

Unnatural links

Google describes unnatural links as "creating links that weren't editorially placed or vouched for by the site's owner on a page." This is a violation of their guidelines and could warrant a penalty against the offending website.

Sentiment

How people feel about your brand.

Link Explorer

Moz's tool for link discovery and analysis.

Guest blogging

Often used as a link building strategy, guest blogging involves pitching an article (or idea for an article) to a publication in the hopes that they will feature your content and allow you to include a link back to your website. Just be careful though. Large-scale guest posting campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text links are a violation of Google's quality guidelines.

Referral Traffic

Traffic sent to a website from another website. For example, if your website is receiving visits from people clicking on your site from a link on Facebook, Google Analytics will attribute that traffic as "facebook.com / referral" in the Source/Medium report.

Link building

While "building" sounds like this activity involves creating links to your website yourself, link building actually describes the process of earning links to your site for the purpose of building your site's authority in search engines.