SEO Glossary – Making Sense of SEO

What is link rot in SEO? When you link to a web page that no longer exists either because it has been moved without a 301 redirect or the website no longer exists then this is known as link rot – your outbound links have rotted away. For most small websites this is not a…

What is QDF in SEO? QDF, or Query Deserves Freshness, detects when the searcher is attempting to access information that is fresh and current and readjusts the ranking pages in the SERP to give priority to those that more closely approximate the most recent search intent. Example: if you searched for a celebrity who just…

What is PageRank in SEO? PageRank is Google’s internal scoring system to determine how valuable a web page is. It’s based on the number of backlinks the page has from other domains and the PageRank of those pages. Years ago webmasters (that’s what we used to call people who managed the websites!) used to obsess…

What is link juice in SEO? This is a euphemism to describe how valuable a link is, or is thought to be in the eyes of Google. A link on an authoritative website such as a national news site or a government website is described as passing more ‘link juice’ than a link from a…

What is domain authority in SEO? Domain Authority is the commercial SEO tools answer to Google PageRank. Since Google no longer publishes the PageRank scores of webpages, SEO analysts needed another way to evaluate how their website is performing and places to try and get backlinks from. All SEO tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, MajesticSEO, and…

What is asynchronous loading in SEO? When a visitor comes to your website the elements such as the HTML, CSS files, images and Javascript are loaded one by one. By telling the browser to load Javascript libraries in parallel with other files instead of in sequence can help to speed up the website because it…

What is image alt text in SEO? The image tag in HTML allows you to add a number of additional attributes that the browser should assign to the image. The alt text is what is displayed if the browser has disabled images or if a person is using a screenreader to consume your content. From…

What is anchor text in SEO? The text used for the link between pages or to another ‘anchor’ on the same page. For example, you might say click here to learn more, where click here is the anchor text. Google considers the anchor text of the backlink when determining how relevant the page being linked…