Definitions
Search engines:
You submit your page to a search engine, and the spider indexs your entire
site. Because most Web Sites contain links to other pages, a spider can
start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes
off and fetches it. The spider is programmed to return to the site on
a regular basis. The more frequently the sites are crawled, the more up-to-date
the search results are.
Theoretically, these spiders might find your site by accident, but odds
are they won't unless you go to them and tell them about your site by
filling out their "Submit" page. Typically, a search engine
works by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible.
Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of a search engine,
the index. The index is like a database that contains the information
the spider found during its crawl. Whenever a user enters a keyword or
keywords into the search box, the search engines searches through the
index to find the word(s) or phrase and returns the matching results.
Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices
such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each search.
Directories:
These rely on submissions from users and Web site owners to populate
their indexes. Most directories add your site to their index, but generally
they link only to your home page rather than indexing the full text of
each page on your site.
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Cloaking:
Also known as stealth technology, a technique used by some Web sites to
deliver one page to a search engine for indexing while serving an entirely
different page to everyone else. There are opposing views as to whether
or not cloaking is ethical. Opponents see it as a bait-and-switch, where
a Web server is scripted to look out for search engines that are spidering
in order to create an index of search results. The search engine thinks
it is selecting a prime match to its request based on the meta tags that
the site administrator has input. However, the search result is misleading
because the meta tags do not correspond to what actually exists on the
page. Some search engines, such as Lycos, Hotbot and Excite, even ban
cloaked Web sites. Proponents of cloaking assert that cloaking is necessary
in order to protect the meta data, as only the spider is supplied with
the meta tags
Dynamic URL:
A URL that results from the search of a database-driven Web site or the
URL of a Web site that runs a script. In contrast to static URLs, in which
the contents of the Web page do not change unless the changes are coded
into the HTML, dynamic URLs are generated from specific search to a site's
database. The page is merely a template to display the results of the
query. Most of the content comes from the database that is associated
with the site. Instead of changing information in the HTML code, the data
is changed in the database.
Dynamic URLs often contain the following characters: ?, &, %, +, =,
$, cgi-bin, .cgi.
A dynamic URL is the address of a dynamic Web page.
Keyword stuffing:
A technique used by Web designers to overload keywords onto a Web page
so that search engines will read the page as being relevant in a Web search.
Because search engines scan Web pages for the words that are entered into
the search criteria by the user, the more times a keyword appears on the
Web page the more relevancy the search engine will assign to the page
in the search results (this is only one way that search engines determine
relevancy, however.) Search engines often penalize a site if the engine
discovers keyword stuffing, as this practice is considered poor etiquette,
and some search engines will even ban the offending Web pages from their
search results.
There are several methods of keyword stuffing. One way is to insert repeating
keywords within the input type="hidden" field meta tag or the
keyword tag so that the keywords are not seen by the user but are scanned
by the search engine. Another way is to make text in the body of the Web
page invisible text, or hidden text, by making the text the same color
as the page’s background, rendering the text invisible to the user
unless the user highlights the text. This method is called invisible keyword
stuffing.
Keyword stuffing also is referred to as keyword loading and spamdexing.
Meta Tag:
A meta tag is a special HTML tag that provides information about a Web
page. Unlike normal HTML tags, meta tags do not affect how the page is
displayed. Instead, they provide information such as who created the page,
how often it is updated, what the page is about, and which keywords represent
the page's content. Many search engines use this information when building
their indices.
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Meta Search Engine:
A meta Search Engine is a search engine that searches other search engines
and then combines the results that are received from all. In effect, the
user is not using just one search engine but a combination of many search
engines at once to optimize Web searching. For example, Dogpile is a meta
search engine.
Page Jacking:
The activity of stealing content (typically in the form of source code)
from a Web site and copying it into another Web site in order to siphon
some of the original site’s traffic to the copied Web pages. Page
Jackers rely on search engines to spider the contents of the illegitimate
site and index the results so that the copied site will appear in the
search result rankings along with the original site’s rankings.
Users can be tricked into thinking the illegitimate site is the one they
are searching for, and once they visit the copied site they may be subjected
to mouse trapping.
Proximity Operator:
A type of operator used by some search engines to improve search constraints
by instructing the search to look for words that are within a short distance
of each other in a document. For example, using a search engine that supports
proximity operators, search the phrase “cable NEAR modem”
will instruct the search engine to look in documents for instances of
the words “cable” and “modem” that are near each
other. Different search engines will specify different distances that
the words must be within.
Link Farming:
The process of exchanging reciprocal links with Websites in order to increase
search engine performance. The idea behind link farming is to increase
the number of sites that link to yours because search engines such as
Google rank sites according to, among many other things, the quality and
quantity of sites that link to yours. In theory, the more sites that link
to yours, the higher your ranking in the search engine results will be
because the more links indicate a higher level of popularity among users
of the Internet. However, search engines such as Google consider link
farming as a form of spam and have been implementing procedures to banish
sites that participate in link farming.
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Thursday | August, 28 | 2008
