Technical SEO Glossary PDF

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Technical SEO Glossary

89 technical SEO terms to know for building a website that ranks, converts, and amazes.
Welcome to HubSpot's Technical SEO Glossary!
Below, you will see a list of 89 terms defined to help you understand and implement various
technical SEO ideas. This should help you create better content and mapping for your website so
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you can attract more visitors, convert more people, and generate more business from your
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We’ve created jump links in case you wanted to skip around.
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301 redirect: A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. 301 redirects send site visitors and search
engines to a different URL than the one they originally typed into their browser or selected from a search engine results
page. A 301 permanent redirect is preferable to a 302 temporary redirect from an SEO standpoint because it transfers the
ranking signals (such as backlink PageRank and backlink anchor text) from the redirected domain to the new one, helping
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maintain its authority, and thus, search rankings. However, search engines such as GoogleLog
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301’s when they are used over an extended period of time . The search engines recognize that you (Source: HubSpot)
Example: Your website used to be called ABCD.com, but you rebranded to EFGH.com. You want everyone who types
in ABCD.com to be taken to EFGH.com from now on. You put a 301 redirect from ABCD.com to EFGH.com in place,
and all visitors who type in ABCD.com are now going to be automatically rerouted to EFGH.com, and all of the
backlinks to ABCD.com will be transferred to EFGH.com. The 301 redirect protects the authority that your backlinks
have created in the eyes of search engines.
302 redirect: A temporary redirect from one URL to another. A site visitor who types a URL which has a 302 redirect on it
will be taken instead to a different URL specified by the person who put the redirect in place. In the past, search engines
did not accept 302 redirects as valid address changes, so ranking signals from the original URL to the new, temporary one
would not transfer. However, this is no longer the case as of 2016. (Source: HubSpot)
Example: Your website used to be called ABCD.com, but you’re doing a major site redesign and want to temporarily
bring everyone to your parent company’s website (ABCDparent.com) instead while your team runs through a quality
assessment on the new ABCD.com. You want everyone who types in ABCD.com to be taken to ABCDparent.com until
the QA process is done, so you put a 302 redirect in place. Anyone who types in ABCD.com while that 302 redirect is in
place will be taken to ABCDparent.com, but search engines aren’t going to transfer all of the SEO authority and
backlinks that ABCD.com has accumulated over to ABCDparent.com. When you’ve confirmed that ABCD.com is
looking great, you remove the 302 redirect, and someone who types in ABCD.com after that will no longer get taken to
ABCDparent.com.
307 redirect: A temporary redirect that points the client to a message letting them know that the resource it requested has
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It’s similar toUs Log in URL to
a 302 redirect in that it re-routes the person that made the web request to the original GetaHubSpot free
different place, but it requires that the client approves sending the request again to a new URL. Most browsers will send
the request again automatically for the user.
403 Forbidden: An HTTP status code sent to users by an HTTP server when a user is trying to access a URL. It means the
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you were tryingUsto reach is forbidden for one of two reasons -- either there is a removal or restriction
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permissions from the client-side, or there's an accidental misconfiguration of the web server. (Source: HubSpot)
404 error: This error message tells the user that the page that the server was not able to find the resource the user
requested. It's a client-side error, meaning either the content of the webpage was removed or moved to a different URL
(and there’s no redirect in place to take people to that new location), or the person just typed in the URL incorrectly.
(Source: HubSpot)
Example: If I typed in www.hubspot.com/justtestingURLs, which doesn’t actually contain any content, I’d be taken to
this standard 404 page instead. This indicates that there’s nothing living at the requested URL, prompting the user to
check to make sure the URL they typed in was correct or to take a different action on the website.
405 method not allowed: An HTTP response status code that indicates a web browser has requested access to one of your
web pages and your web server received and recognized its HTTP method (Source: HubSpot).
410 error: An error message that indicates that the content at the URL that the user requested is gone -- it used to exist
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It’s similar to a 404 error, but a 410 error gives more information to search in Get HubSpot free
Specifically, if the page was indexed before, a 410 error will let search engines know that they can de-index that URL
because there’s nothing there anymore. (Source: Blue Corona)
500 error: An error message that indicates that something went wrong on the server side, so the server is not able to
deliver the content that the user (and client) requested. It’s a general error message that doesn’t specify anything about
exactly what went wrong on the server side.
Pro tip: If search engines find that your website is constantly offline or inaccessible, they will decrease the frequency
they crawl your website, or even remove the content's rankings. In other words – avoid these at all cost.
(Image Source)

502 bad gateway: A general indicator that there's something wrong with a website's server communication. Since it's just
a generic error, it doesn't actually tell you the website's exact issue. When this happens, your website will serve an error
web page to your site's visitors, like the photo below. (Source: HubSpot)
503 error: An error message that means that the server hosting the requested content can’t handle the request right now.
It could be that the server is under maintenance or that it’s overloaded with requests. The server is still functioning correctly
-- it’s just letting the user know that it’s unable to handle the user’s request at the moment. (Source: HubSpot)
504 gateway timeout: This means your web server didn’t receive a timely response from another server upstream when it
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A-B
Absolute URL: A URL that contains all of the information in a web address that’s required to locate a certain resource. It
includes the protocol (e.g. http:// and https://) and the domain (e.g. www.hubspot.com) , as well as any paths afterward
that point to a specific page or file.
Example: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/seo

Alt text (a.k.a. alt attributes, alt descriptions): The written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the
image fails to load on a user's screen. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers
and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website. (Source: HubSpot)
Accelerated mobile pages (AMP): A web component framework launched by Google that developers can use to create
mobile webpages that load almost instantly and provide a cleaner user experience. Pages using AMP load faster because
AMP restricts the use of certain HTML tags, types of CSS, and JavaScript. This means that loading the pages uses less data
than loading normal pages. Google keeps a cache of all of the pages created on AMP so that Google itself can load the
page it has a copy of -- without needing to get the content of the page from another source. (Source: Moz)
To build AMP pages, you need to create another version of your site that follows the AMP project’s standards. Once
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AMP site will have its own URL (site.com/page/amp) and be compatible with mostLog in
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browsers like Chrome, FireFox, and Safari. (Source: HubSpot)

Asynchronous loading: A type of page loading in which certain elements of the page load at the same time per directions
in the code of the page. Normally, under synchronous loading, the browser will load the elements in order from the top to
the bottom of the HTML of the page, but a script that’s loaded asynchronously will load while another does. Even if this
cuts down on page load time, which has positive SEO benefits, developers should be careful of asynchronous loading
while running A/B tests because it can cause a flicker while loading -- the control version may load first and then flicker and
ultimately show the variant. (Source: Optimizely)

Backlink (a.k.a. inbound link): A form of off-page SEO where you earn links from other websites that direct readers to your
own site. If blog.hubspot.com is listing industry events in marketing, for example, and links out to www.inbound.com,
www.inbound.com will consider that link from blog.hubspot.com back to their site to be an inbound link, or backlink.
Backlinks are the backbone of a link building SEO strategy, where websites reach out to other websites to earn links back
to their website. Google looks at the number of backlinks to a given site when determining its authority because a high
number of backlinks indicates that the content of that website or webpage is useful to many people.

Bait and switch AKA code swapping: A black hat SEO tactic that involves filling a page with content that you know will rank
well in SERPs and, once the page is ranking well, swapping the content of that page for other content that you knew
wouldn’t rank as well if you’d put it on the page from the outset. This tactic isn’t very common and is considered unethical
by legitimate SEOs.
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Black hat SEO: A set of practices against search engine guidelines used to get a site ranking higher in search results. These
unethical tactics don’t solve for the searcher and often end in a penalty from search engines. Black hat techniques include
keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks. Google and other search engines have mechanisms in place to
detect these practices, and they’ll penalize you if they detect that you’re engaging in this kind of behavior.

Bounce rate: The percentage of all of your website visitors who land on a page on your website and then leave your site
after viewing that single page. Importantly, bounce rate has slightly different definitions depending on the analytics tool
you’re using. In Google Analytics, for example, bounce rate is “single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the
percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page” (Source: Google).
It could also be the average across all pages of the percent of people who viewed a specific page and then left.
Your bounce rate’s impact on search rankings is also contentious. Google says that it’s not a ranking factor, but many SEOs
claim that higher bounce rates result in lower search rankings.
A high bounce rate doesn’t always mean that users don’t like your site. For example, if you write a really thorough blog
post that’s intended to answer a ton of FAQs, people could spend a significant amount of time reading the page and then
leave because the website has answered all of the questions they had.

Breadcrumb markup: Breadcrumb markup denotes the structure of a given page to give Google a sense of the structure of
that page. Using breadcrumb markup makes it easier for Google to understand the organization of your content and can
thus help you earn enhanced results like rich cards, carousels, knowledge boxes, and featured snippets in SERPs. (Moz)

Breadcrumb navigation: A type of website navigation that allows the user to see how they’ve arrived at a subcategory or a
page that’s specific relative to the rest of the website pages. From the user’s perspective, you can navigate from a specific
webpage all the way back up through the page hierarchy to the home page by following the breadcrumbs.
Example: At the top of an online shoe shop, you might see Home > Women’s > Boots > Rainboots. You could click
back up through those subcategories to navigate back up to the store homepage.
(Image Source)

Brotli compression: Brotli is an open-source, lossless compression algorithm that allows you to compress (or reduce the
size of) the data on your website. It’s best used for text compression and shouldn’t be used for image compression. It is the
current best practice to use Brotli compression rather than gzip compression for SEO purposes because it uses a
dictionary, so it sends keys rather than full words, which makes it more efficient; Brotli has been found to reduce the size of
HTML, CSS, and Javascript files significantly as compared with gzip. Brotli can be found here on GitHub.
Canonical URL: In technical SEO, the preferred page for search engines to crawl, index, and rank when duplicate or near-
duplicates exist. Ranking signals from duplicates are consolidated to the canonical URL. You can use the rel="canonical"
link tag within http or html headers to denote which page is the preferred one.
Client-side vs. server-side rendering:
Client-side rendering means that the client, generally the browser that’s making the web request, is the one that
renders the web page. The browser (the client) sends out the web request and the server sends the rendering
instructions (in JavaScript, usually) back to the client. Then, the client executes all of the directions, logic, and data
fetching. This minimizes the load on the server. There tends to be more testing involved for good execution, and in
order for client-side rendering to work at scale, you’ll probably need to write additional JS.
Server-side rendering means that the server, the host of the content on the webpage, is the one that renders the page
after the browser makes the request. The server executes all of the instructions in the code and then delivers all of that
back to the client in the form of HTML. The client can’t see all of the scripting from the front end, so typically, server-side
rendering is more secure than client-side.
What’s the difference from the site visitor’s perspective? Server-side rendering is going to be slower (or have a lower time
to first byte, or TTFB) because the server has to put all of the pieces together and execute the instructions before sending
the resulting page contents back to the client, where the visitor can see it.
What’s the difference from an SEO perspective? Which is better for SEO? Crawlers can more easily interpret a page
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lot of Javascript
involved in client-side rendering. To see how easy it is for crawlers to understand your site, Google recommends using this
Mobile Friendly Test tool, which will give you an idea of how your site is performing on all devices, as a litmus test.
Are there other options? Yes. If you are already using a lot of client-side JavaScript in your site architecture, you can
consider dynamic rendering to make it easier for crawlers to interpret your site (Google).
Here’s a helpful graphic for understanding the various other options on the spectrum from client-side to server-side
rendering:
(Image Source)

Cloaking: A black hat SEO technique that involves showing different things to humans and crawlers. Typically, those who
engage in this behavior are trying to show something that’s easy for a crawler to understand (like HTML) to the search
engines instead of the actual content that the search engine might have more difficulty interpreting (e.g. Javascript, Flash,
or images). A site that’s easier for crawlers to understand will likely outrank a site that’s difficult to interpret.
Pro Tip: Cloaking is considered a black hat SEO practice because it can be deceiving to the user -- the user might end
up on a page totally different from the one they were expecting when they clicked on the search result. It’s also a
violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Content automation: Using any kind of automated tool (i.e. not a human) to create content in the hopes that more content
will result in more for search engines to find and then rank. This tactic is considered a black hat SEO technique because the
content is not created with the user’s intent in mind or collected and consolidated with a human eye.
Content pruning: A strategy that involves assessing the value of your site content and removing, updating, consolidating,
and/or redirecting the low-value pages.
Country code top-level domains (ccTLDs): A top-level domain is the suffix that appears at the end of a domain name, and a
country code top-level domain is one that’s typically reserved for a particular country. They’re important in SEO because
they are the most definitive way to tell a search engine that your website content is made for people living in a certain
country or region. Note that the ccTLD does not communicate language. You can find a list of ccTLDs here.
Example: HubSpot’s French website is located at www.hubspot.fr. In that URL, the ccTLD is ‘.fr’. ‘.Fr’ is the ccTLD for
most French websites.
Crawl budget: The number of URLs on your site that Google can and wants to crawl. It’s a combination of crawl demand
and crawl rate. Low-quality content, soft error pages, hacked pages, or duplicate content can negatively impact crawling
and indexing by using up a lot of your crawl budget. (Source: Google)
Crawl demand: The amount of demand there is for Google’s bots to crawl your pages. The more there is of the following
things, the more crawl demand there will be:
Popularity: The more popular your site is, the more often Google will crawl it to make sure that its index is fresh.
Staleness: How long it’s been since Google last crawled your URLs. Google wants to make sure that the URLs in its index
are up-to-date. Pages that change more frequently are crawled more often, but your “Contact Us” page, for example,
probably isn’t going “stale” very often, so it’ll be crawled less often.
Site-wide events (e.g. migrations): When Google detects major changes across your website, it’ll crawl again to make
sure that the new content is indexed properly.
Crawl depth: The extent to which search engines index your site content. A site with good internal linking will help crawlers
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site if they can’t follow internal links around. To improve crawl depth, you can use breadcrumb navigation, maintain your
XML sitemap (i.e. give Google a directory of the URLs it should index), and make improvements to your site’s speed. If the
crawler detects slow load times, it’ll stop following links around your site.
Crawl rate: The number of times Googlebot (Google’s crawlers) can crawl your site in a given time frame without
overloading your servers. Google measures the time it has to wait between fetching information from your site to figure
out how quickly the servers can work. Your crawl rate will go up if your server responds to Googlebot’s requests quickly,
indicating that it can handle more requests. If your server is slow to respond to Google, Google will assume it’s pretty busy
and crawl your website less frequently. A faster site provides a better user experience while also increasing the crawl rate
(Googlebot perceives a fast site as a sign of healthy, non-overloaded servers). However, according to Google, crawl rate
itself is not a ranking factor. (Source: Google)
Crawl rate limit: A limit you can set within Google Search Console to tell Google the maximum amount of times you’d like
it to crawl your website in a given time frame.
Critical rendering path: The set of steps a browser takes to convert HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a usable website for a
site visitor. Developers can optimize their websites for the critical rendering path, which will improve the time to first
render. You can learn more about how to optimize for it here. (Source: Google)
(Image Source)
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Domain authority: Domain authority, or DA, is a third-party metric created by Moz to approximate how high your website
will rank in SERPs. DA ranges on a scale of 0-100. Numbers closer to 100 indicate that the website is likely to rank well in
SERPs, and lower numbers indicate that the website is not likely to rank well. DA is not a ranking factor in Google and has
no effect on SERPs -- it’s simply for SEOs, webmasters, marketers, and others to get a sense for how powerful the website
likely is in a search engine’s eyes.
Although DA is specific to Moz, other SEO-focused tools have their own, corollary metrics. Examples can be found below:
Authority (from SEMRush)

Domain (Ahrefs)
TrustFlow (Majestic)

Deindexation: Deindexation occurs when a URL is taken out of a search engine’s index. The index is essentially a search
engine’s address book of the internet. You can think of it as a list of all of the pages that a search engine bot has found as
it’s crawled all over the web. When a page is de-indexed, its URL is taken out of that “address book.”
In order to de-index a page in Google, you can submit a URL removal request in Google Search Console. Wait for a good
few days or weeks for de-indexation to happen. The rate at which content is removed from Google’s index depends on
how much bandwidth Google has and how important your website is to Google. You can add a robots no-index meta tag
within the <head> tag of a single page, as follows:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Disavow: The disavow tool within Google Search Console allows you to tell Google not to consider a set of low-quality
backlinks (also known as toxic backlinks) to your site. If a website with a high spam score is linking to your website, Google
may penalize your site for that backlink thinking you’re attempting to add building a backlink profile via spammy means. In
order to remove that penalty, you must tell Google not to take those low-quality backlinks into account to prove that your
backlinking strategies are well-intentioned. You can find step-by-step instructions on using the disavow tool here.

DNS: DNS stands for Domain Name System. DNS is the address book of the internet, mapping IP addresses to the
domains that people type in. It’s what allows us to type in www.hubspot.com when we want to go to HubSpot’s website
rather than the string of numbers (the IP address) that represents the location of the content that lives on the website. The
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internet user is requesting when that user types in a web address.

Domain name registrar: A domain registrar is an accredited company that has the right to sell domain names. If you want
to buy a domain name like MyCompanyName.com, you’d have to go directly to a domain name registrar or to a reseller
who’s under contract with a registrar in order to buy that name and therefore have the rights to publish content at
MyCompanyName.com. Examples include: Domain.com, GoDaddy, Bluehost, Register.com, and HostGator.

Doorway page: A page created with the intent of ranking highly for certain search queries that subsequently sends users
to a different site. Using doorway pages is considered a black hat SEO technique because it can lead to multiple pages
that ultimately point users to the same final destination all ranking in the same SERP. That means that there are fewer
unique results for the user to select from in the SERP. Doorway pages range in shadiness -- on the worst end of the
spectrum, they might be keyword-stuffed, machine-generated content. On the less concerning end, they might be
separate webpages targeted at different regions that eventually bring users to the same content. Doorway pages often
contain hidden text and sometimes automatically redirect users to one ultimate page that the site’s owner wants the users
to see.

Duplicate content: When the same content (a substantive portion of text or other page components) appears on two URLs,
Google sees it as duplicate content. The content is considered duplicate whether it appears on the same domain or
separate domains.
There are common non-malicious practices that result in duplicate content -- for example, discussion forums that generate
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version of the forum for mobile devices may end up generating two separate
Duplicate content can hurt search rankings because it causes a number of problems for search engines:
The search engine isn’t sure which URL to rank in results for a specific query because it can’t tell which page is better.
The search engine doesn’t know how to split the value of the content (as judged by keywords, anchor text, link equity,
trust, and more) between the URLs.
Typically, search engines deal with duplicate content by selecting one of the two pages. In cases where you’re aware that
you have duplicate content, you can use canonicalized tags to tell Google which one to rank.

Dynamic rendering: A way of rendering webpages that can detect whether a crawler or human is using a page and load
the page differently depending on who it is. Dynamic rendering optimizes for crawlers when it’s a crawler accessing the
page and loads pages normally when it’s a human. Since crawlers struggle with Javascript, a renderer will deal with the
Javascript and then deliver static HTML to the crawler, which the crawler can much more easily interpret. This means that
humans still get the flexible and fast experience that client-side rendering allows for, and the crawlers will be better
equipped to understand the site architecture, so the page will likely rank better.
(Image Source)

E-A-T (Expertise-Authoritativeness-Trustworthiness): Google’s acronym for what a high-quality page needs. Google has
confirmed that it’s a ranking factor; a page with high E-A-T as measured by Google’s artificial intelligence will rank higher
than a page with low E-A-T.
Expertise is demonstrated with high-quality main content that’s developed by someone who is actually an expert on
that topic -- for example, medical advice should be created by a doctor or a credentialed medical body.
Authoritativeness is achieved when the creator of the information is uniquely positioned to provide information about
the topic. For example, the National Parks Service would have the most reliable information about entry fees to its
parks.
Trustworthiness measures the safety of the browsing experience. A more trustworthy site is one that is secure and
doesn’t expose its users information. The contact information of the webmaster is visible.
You can read Google’s in-depth analysis of E-A-T in its Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
*Note: Some sources online inaccurately represent this concept as Expertise-Authority-Trust, but Google’s guidelines
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External links: A link that points to a webpage that exists outside of the domain where the link lives. If your site links out to
a source for a certain piece of information, that’s an external link. If another site links out to your site, that’s also considered
an external link on their site.
In HTML, this looks like: <a href="http://www.otherwebsite.com/">Link Anchor Text</a>

Fetch and Render: A tool by Google that allows you to enter a URL and see how Google itself views that page. This
enables you to check that the content that you want to block from Google is blocked successfully. In the process, Google
will also check all of the links on the page. Once the fetch and render is complete, you’ll see a side-by-side comparison of
what a user sees and what Google sees. You can then pinpoint any errors that you may need to correct.

‘follow’ links: When you anchor link text on your site, you pass authority onto the page to which you link unless you specify
otherwise (see: ‘nofollow’ link). By creating an anchor text without a ‘nofollow’ attribute, you’re telling search engines that
they can pass on authority to the page you’ve linked, thus helping the page you’ve linked out to rank higher.
*Note: Some SEO resources online refer to ‘follow’ links as ‘dofollow’ links, but ‘dofollow’ does not actually exist as an
HTML attribute. You do not need to add an HTML attribute to tell Google to follow a link.
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Gzip compression: A data compression algorithm that used to be the best practice for text compression before Google
made the Brotli compression algorithm open-source. Brotli significantly reduces the size of HTML, CSS, and Javascript files
as compared with gzip.
Header tags: Header tags are denoted by <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc. in the head HTML of a page. They tell the site visitor and
search engines what each page is about. <h1> denotes the title of the page, whereas <h2> is typically a subheader. The
header tags should include the keywords you’re hoping to rank for.
In HTML, if you wanted to name an article ‘Your Title Here’, your line of code would read as follows:
<h1>Your Title Here</h1>
Hreflang: The hreflang HTML attribute tells Google the language of your content so that it can serve your content to the
users who are searching in the language that your page is in. For example, a Spanish hreflang tag will tell Google to serve
that Spanish version of the page, rather than the English version of the page, to users whose search engine language is set
to Spanish. The hreflang tag denotes that the page is an alternative to another page that’s the same content -- just in a
different language. Hreflang is often used to account for currency, shipping, or cultural differences.
Google uses ISO 639-1 tags to represent languages in code.
An hreflang tag can be implemented in the on-page markup, the HTTP header, or the sitemap as follows (Spanish is shown
in the following example using the “es-es” annotation):
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com" hreflang="es-es" />


HTML sitemap: An outline of a website’s navigation that’s written for humans. Most HTML sitemaps are linked in the
bottom navigation of a website. They enable site visitors to find pages they’re looking for. It’s similar to an index at the end
of a book, which is intended to help its readers locate a specific section among a huge amount of content.
Here’s an example of an HTML sitemap:
Image Source: Statcounter


*Note: Most of the time someone references a sitemap, they’re talking about the XML sitemap, which is also an outline of a
site’s navigation but is written for search engines rather than humans.
Hummingbird: An update to Google’s algorithm in Sept. 2013 that overhauled the way that Google analyzed a search
query. Instead of solely focusing on finding matches for words in the search query, Google started to look for the meaning
behind the query as a whole by using natural language processing. It also improved the mechanics of the Knowledge
Graph, which meant that Google was more effectively able to answer question queries right in the SERP (rather than
forcing users to click through on one of the search results). (Source: WordStream)
Image compression: Image compression is a process that reduces the file size of an image, meaning it will take up less
storage space and load more quickly. By compressing images, you can reduce load time, create a better user experience,
and optimize for search engines’ crawlers.
There are two main types, lossy and lossless. Lossless compression preserves the photo quality -- when someone opens
the image, it will look the same as it did when someone sent that photo via email or put it on their website. Lossy
compression actually discards parts of the photo, so the image quality is reduced upon opening the compressed file.
However, lossy-compressed photos take up less storage space than lossless ones. (Source: KeyCDN)
Image sitemap: An image sitemap is an XML file that provides metadata about the photos on your site. It gives search
engines more context about the images, helping search engines discover more than they might have otherwise. The
metadata could include the title of the photo, the source, the location, or other pieces of information. You can see an
example of an image sitemap here.

Internal links: An anchor link on a site that links to another page on the same domain. For example, a link on
www.hubspot.com that points to https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/ is considered an internal link because both pages are
on the domain hubspot.com.
JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data): JSON-LD is a type of structured data markup that allows you to
encode linked data. It essentially organizes data in a manner that humans can easily read and write. It pairs attributes with
values; for example:
Image Source: JSON-LD.org
It’s available in many programming environments, such as Ruby, C#, Python, and Javascript.
Keyword density: A measure of the number of times a keyword is repeated on one webpage. It’s calculated by dividing
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Previously, high keyword density was thought to be good for SEO because it would give search engines clarity on the site’s
content. However, people were “keyword stuffing,” or repeating a keyword so many times and so unnaturally that it
created a poor user experience, so Google stopped using keyword density as a ranking factor. Now, search engines are
more likely to consider a website that repeats or stuffs keywords spammy and penalize it in SERPs.
L-M
Lazy loading: When a page is coded in such a way that the page components load only when the user needs them, rather
than all at once upon the first page load. For example, the images after the first one in an image carousel may load only
when the user starts to flip through the carousel.
The effect of lazy loading on SEO depends on its use. If a large piece of text containing helpful information (e.g. a Q&A
section or a blog post) is lazy loaded, web crawlers may completely skip over that piece of text because it hasn’t loaded in
yet -- which would mean that the search engine could miss out on target keywords and understanding the structure of the
page. However, if data-heavy images are lazy-loaded in a thoughtful way, it can improve page load time and create a
better user experience by not overwhelming the user as soon as they load the page. (Source: StackPath)
Link building/link acquisition: Link building is an SEO strategy that involves placing hyperlinks back to your site on other
websites by reaching out to the webmasters of those other sites. A high number of high-quality backlinks from relevant and
authoritative websites can significantly improve your website’s search rankings.


Link buying: A black hat SEO technique that involves paying money to another business or individual to place links to your
site on their site in an attempt to generate more backlinks. Link buying has long violated Google’s Terms of Service.
Link equity: The authority that’s passed from Page A to Page B when Page A hyperlinks out to Page B. The amount of
authority, casually referred to as “link juice,” depends on how authoritative Page A is, how closely related the content on
the pages are, and other directions given in the hyperlink (e.g. a ‘nofollow’ attribute signals to web crawlers that they
should ignore them). (Source: Moz)
Link reclamation: The process of systematically reaching out to other websites and fixing your own site when you find dead
or broken links to your site in an effort to preserve the link equity flowing through the links to your pages. This process
often needs to happen after URLs are changed in bulk or a website undergoes a redesign and content is changed or
removed. There are tools that can help you identify broken links to your website pages. Cleaning up these dead links
improves both the user experience and the ability of bots to crawl your hyperlinks. (Source: SearchEngineJournal)
Local Business schema/local business listing: When users Google businesses in their vicinity, Google often returns a
Knowledge Graph card that allows users to see images of it, the address, the rating, the phone number, and more. To tell
Google what to put in those information slots, businesses can follow Local Business listing markup rules, or schema
markup. This typically involves using JSON-LD formatting in your webpage’s HTML to tag information to make it easier for
Google to find key facts.
You can find the standard structured data definitions you can use in Local Business listings here and find the full definition
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of theLocal Business schema here. Log in Get HubSpot free
Here is an example of what a local business listing looks like in a mobile result:
(Image Source: Google)
Meta description: A description of your page that you denote HTML tag in the header HTML of your page that tells search
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engines
 Contact Us what your page contains. A search engine-optimized meta description containsLog
and searchers in target
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keyword and communicates the value that the page will give to the people who read it. Google cuts off meta descriptions
at 160 characters. Although meta descriptions are not a ranking factor according to Google, they’re crucial to convincing
searchers that your page is worth clicking through to.
The code might look like this:
<head>
<meta name="description" content="This is where you write your meta description.">
</head>
A meta description often appears just below the title tag and the URL of your page in search engine results. The following
example shows where it appears on a SERP:
Meta refresh tag: A meta refresh is a command that webmasters can code into HTML to tell a browser to refresh a page
after a certain number of seconds. It uses the <meta> tag, and ‘refresh’ is the value that the webmaster puts in for the http-
equiv attribute. Google indexes the page that exists upon refresh rather than the page that initially loads to avoid
spammers who try to trick users by taking them to the page they clicked on and then quickly redirecting them somewhere
else.
The code would look like this for someone who wanted their page to refresh after 20 seconds:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="20"/>
It’s also possible to implement a redirect by using a meta refresh tag with the time set to 0 seconds and an additional URL
attribute set to the destination URL.
The code would look like this for someone who wanted their page to refresh after 20 seconds:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=[destination URL goes here]"/>
However, Google recommends using a 301 redirect over a meta refresh tag to institute a redirect to ensure that the search
engine and users don’t have a misleading or confusing experience by being suddenly redirected -- and thus perceive the
site as spam, leading to lower rankings.
Minification: A process done after coding a page but before launching that page that involves stripping all of the
unnecessary data out of a page to ensure that the page loads as quickly as possible. Examples of minification techniques
include reducing whitespace on a page and shortening variable and function names. The net effect is reduced page load
time, so using minification can improve SEO by improving PageSpeed. (Source: Stackpath)
Mobile viewport tag: The viewport refers to the area of a page that a user on a specific device can see. The mobile
viewport tag is the HTML instruction given in the <meta> tag of a page’s header that tells the browser how to deal with the
page’s dimensions since usually, the width of a page on a desktop computer is greater than the width on a mobile device.
It’s important to include the viewport tag to demonstrate to search engines that your page is mobile-friendly, which helps
you rank higher.
Someone who wanted to tell the browser to adjust the page to the width of the device rather than keeping it at its
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<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
The width=device-width section tells the browser to take the width of the device into account when rendering the page;
the initial-scale=1 portion tells the browser the initial zoom level it should use when it first loads the page. (Source:
W3Schools)
Here are two images of the same page, one that includes the viewport meta tag and one that does not:
(Image Source: W3Schools)
Mobile-first indexing: Google’s practice of crawling, indexing, and ranking the mobile version of a page before the
desktop version of the page. This means that Google prefers responsive web design, looks to the mobile URL while
indexing if there are separate URLs for different device types, and preferences pages that are created in AMP HTML,
among other best practices. As of late 2018, Google crawled over half of pages in search results according to this
procedure, and as of May 2019, all pages that Google is discovering for the first time are evaluated using mobile-first
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N-Q
‘nofollow’ link: A nofollow attribute added to the HTML of an anchor link will tell Google that you do not want it to pass on
authority to the page that you’re linking out to. As of Sept. 2019, when Google rolled out a change that made ‘nofollow’ a
recommendation to Google rather than a command, Google recommends that you “Use this attribute for cases where you
want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another
page” (Source: Google).
Orphan page: A page with no links to it. This is problematic from an SEO perspective because web crawlers discover
pages and index them by following (essentially clicking on) links on the pages it knows, so there is no way for search
engines to know about an orphan page unless it’s included in the site’s XML sitemap submitted to the search engine. Even
if it does appear on the sitemap, it’s unlikely that the page would appear in the webmaster’s desired SERPs because there
would be no authority being passed to that page from other pages. It also limits the structural context that the search
engine has on that page.
Page authority: Page authority, or PA, is a metric developed by Moz to approximate how well a particular webpage is likely
to rank in search engines. PA ranges from 0 to 100. Numbers closer to 100 indicate that the webpage is likely to rank well
in SERPs, and lower numbers indicate that that page is not likely to rank well. PA is not a ranking factor in Google and has
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on SERPs Log in
it’s simply for SEOs, webmasters, marketers, and others to get a sense for how powerful theGet HubSpot free
specific
webpage most likely is in a search engine’s eyes.
PageRank: Google’s algorithm that gives every webpage a score showing how important and authoritative it is relative to
other, related pages on the internet. It takes into account the quality and quantity of the links to that page from other
pages. Google gives each page a public-facing score from 1-10, but it’s possible for pages to accumulate more points than
that if they have strong link profiles (i.e. plenty of links to that page from other, authoritative internal and external pages).
The quality of links to a page is increasingly important (rather than the quantity of links). (Sources: BruceClay, LinkAssistant)
PageSpeed Insights: PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a tool from Google that analyzes the desktop and mobile speed of a page
and provides insights into how to improve the speed of that page. Most prominently, it looks at First Contentful Paint (the
time between the navigation to the page and when the browser renders the first element of DOM content) and First Input
Delay (the time between when a user interacts with your page and when that page responds to the user’s request).
Since the speed of your pages impacts their ability to rank well in Google, it’s advantageous for SEO to follow Google’s
advice on ways to improve your pages’ speed. Some of the most common recommendations for improving page speed
include minification, limiting your use of redirects, improving server response time, and reducing reliance on render-
blocking Javascript. (Source: Google)
Pagination: A set of directions to put in the head HTML of your pages that are part of a series. When there are several
separate pages of similar content structured in a similar way -- for example, multiple pages of blog search results or
multiple pages of products in a certain category on an ecommerce site -- you can use pagination to tell search engines that
your content is split across slightly different URLs that are in a particular order.
Here’s an example:
There are many pages of articles on HubSpot’s Marketing Blog. The first page of articles is filled with the most recent posts
and exists at https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing. The set of next-most-recent articles lives at
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/page/2. The third-most-recent set is at
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/page/3.
Using canonical tags and rel=”prev” and rel=”next” attributes properly on the pages within a series is key for
communicating the structure of paginated results to search engines. (Source: Search Engine Journal)
Panda: A series of algorithm updates Google rolled out between 2011 and 2015 whose changes were intended to
prioritize higher-quality sites over lower-quality sites in search results. It looked to reward those who put out in-depth,
trustworthy information and penalize sites containing lots of duplicate content, ads, thin content, and low-quality, user-
generated content like poorly written guest blog posts. (Source: Moz)
Penguin: A series of algorithm updates Google rolled out between 2012 and 2016, just after the Panda updates, that
doubled down on rewarding high-quality websites. Penguin was focused on penalizing sites that participated in link
schemes (e.g. purchasing backlinks) and keyword stuffing. (Source: Search Engine Land)
Query Deserves Freshness (QDF): QDF was an algorithm update by Google in late 2011 that helped to identify when
someone’s query showed they were looking for “fresh” (i.e. new) content, such as recent events, hot topics, and regularly
occurring events.

R-X
Rel=canonical: An HTML element used to ensure only the main (“canonical”) URL appears in search results when duplicate
content is being utilized. (Source: Yoast)
Rel=”noopener noreferrer”: Two attributes applied to hyperlinks on your pages that improve your site’s security. It’s
typically used in conjunction with the _blank command, which tells the browser to open the link in a new window.
The “noopener” attribute tells the browser to open a new window while restarting the window.opener Javascript
process, which means that it won’t pass information about the original window to the new window that opens up.
The “noreferrer” attribute operates similarly but specifically prevents referrer information from being passed to the new
window.
While some SEOs are wary of using rel="noopener noreferrer" thinking it will negatively impact SEO, there’s no proven
effect on SEO as there is with rel="nofollow". (Source: Search Engine Laws)
Relative URL: A URL that excludes some information about the location of the resource, like the protocol (e.g. http:// or
https://) or the domain (e.g. www.hubspot.com). The referring page is going to assume the rest of the information that isn’t
specified.
Analogy: Using a relative URL is similar to telling a friend who lives nearby your street name and number but not giving
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
town, Contact Us
state, country, or zip code (because the friend has additional context on you that can leadLog in
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of those additional pieces of information correctly). Using an absolute URL would be like writing a friend on another
continent’s full address on a package -- you need to communicate every detail to the post office, or the package won’t
arrive in the right place.
Example: If there were a link on a page on www.hubspot.com to “/resources” (code shown below), the browser would
assume that the path was referencing a page on the www.hubspot.com subdomain and take someone who clicked on
that hyperlink to www.hubspot.com/resources.
Code: <a href="/resources">
Render-blocking scripts: A script that prevents a page from loading. This situation typically results from JavaScript that is
intended to improve your page’s aesthetic but turns into a time hog. (Source: HubSpot)
Rich snippet: Enhanced search results that produce more details about a website than the average link. This "rich" media
can include images, ratings, authors, dates, locations, and more. (Source: HubSpot)
Robots.txt: A file that tells search engines how to crawl and index the pages on your site. It's important because it helps as
search engines crawl your site and index content to serve users looking for that information. Search engines will look for a
robots.txt file before crawling your site to see if there are any instructions. Even though your robots.txt file might instruct a
search engine not to crawl a page, it can't actually prevent it from being indexed. To do that, you'll want to use noindex,
nofollow, nosnippet, noimageindex, or noarchive directives. (Source: HubSpot)

Search Volume/MSV: A metric for the number of people who search for a given term in a certain time period (usually one
English
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MSV stands Us monthly search volume). Log in Get HubSpot free
Server: The computing device or program which provides access to a centralized service in a network. (Source: Oxford)
SSL: The standard security technology used to ensure data privacy when passed between a browser and a web server.
(Sources: HubSpot/SSL)
Structured data/Schema.org: Any set of data that is organized and structured in a particular way on a webpage. In the case
of SEO, structured data is organized and tagged with specific groups of text that help search engines understand the
context of that information and can return accurate results to searchers. (Source: HubSpot)
Title tag: An HTML tag put in the header of a webpage that denotes the title of the page. In search results, the title tag is
the first, most prominent line of the result. It also appears at the top of a tab within multi-tab browsers and is often pulled
out by social networks when the URL of the page is shared by users to give more information about what the user shared.
The arrow in the image below shows where the title, denoted by the title tag in the page’s code, appears in SERPs:
Web crawler: A web crawler, also known as a spider or spiderbot (e.g. Googlebot, Bingbot), is a bot that accesses sites
across the internet systematically to determine what each website page’s content is about and collect data about each site
to give back to search engines. The information they collect via crawling is then used to index pages in what is essentially
the search engine’s address book of the internet. Unless given other directions via a ‘nofollow’ attribute, the crawlers will
follow all of the hyperlinks on your pages and then follow the hyperlinks on those pages to make their way around the
internet.
XML Sitemap: A list of your website’s most important pages that Google should crawl – even if they do not have internal
links pointing there.
Final Thoughts
We hope this glossary has helpful! We know how complicated SEO can be, so hopefully this
resource was able to clear things up.
Quick note: We know SEO is always changing, so if any definition here is no longer accurate,
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you're Us to reach out to [email protected] and we'll update the guide. Log in Get HubSpot free
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What is a 301 redirect and what is its purpose?

What is a 301 redirect and what is its purpose?

What is a 302 redirect and how does it differ from a 301 redirect?

What is a 302 redirect and how does it differ from a 301 redirect?

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