Terminology and concepts

Anchor text

The text (or image) representing the link is the Anchor text. A typical Anchor text would be something like «Click here to proceed».

Black Hat SEO

In contrast to White Hat SEO, Black Hat SEO is the way of trying to increase a page’s ranking in search engines through means of violating the search engines’ terms of service. Most search engines these days manage to cope with most techniques used by Black Hat SEOs, and sites trying to increase its ranking by using these techniques play at high risk, as being «caught» trying to cheat the algorithms and rules of the search engines will most likely end up with the domain in question being completely banned and removed from the search engines’ index.

Cloaking

Cloaking is a SEO technique in which the content presented to the search engine crawler is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. When a user is identified as a search engine crawler, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page, or that is present but not searchable. Most search engines deals easily with cloaking these days, and with the consequence for the related site that it gets banned and blocked from the search engines’ index.

Googlebot

This is the nickname of the crawlers (or spiders) used by Google to crawl and browse through the billions of websites that exists, and sending its findings back to the search engine’s index. You can read more about the Googlebot and how it works under the «The Crawling» chapter.

Website

This book uses the term «website» for a collection of pages owned and controlled by a single entity (individual, business, etc).

Webmaster

The person responsible for maintaining a website.

Homepage

This is the main page of a website, and usually the first page that users see when the site loads. The homepage should have links directly (or indirectly, if the website consists of many pages) to all pages within that website.

YMYL

Your Money or Your Life.

Websites that could potentially impact the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety to users. Examples are online shopping, financial, medical, legal, or public/official information. Google has a very high Page Quality (PQ) ratings standard for YMYL websites.