SEO glossary

The words you’ll meet when you compare SEO tools, in plain English, each explained from the pages of the company that defines it.

• 301 redirectA permanent server-side redirect from a page's old address to its new one, which Google takes as a signal to show the new address in search results.
• AI OverviewsAn AI feature in Google Search that gives the gist of a topic or question for some searches, with links to web pages that support the information.
• Alt textA written description of an image in the page's code. It helps people who use screen readers, and Google uses it to understand what the image shows.
• Anchor textThe visible, clickable words of a link. They tell people and Google something about the page the link points to.
• BreadcrumbA trail of links showing where a page sits in a site's hierarchy, which BreadcrumbList structured data lets Google show in search results.
• Built for ShopifyShopify's highest recognition for an app in its App Store, for apps that meet its quality standards, including a limit on how much an app may slow a store down.
• Canonical URLThe address Google treats as the main version of a page when the same content can be reached at more than one address.
• Core Web VitalsGoogle's three measures of how a page feels to real visitors: how fast its main content loads, how quickly it responds, and how stable it stays visually.
• Crawl budgetThe set of URLs on a site that Google can and wants to crawl; Google's guide to it is for large sites whose pages change often, and others don't need to read it.
• Crawlable linkA link Google can follow to find another page, which generally means an HTML a element with an href attribute pointing to a real web address.
• Disavowing linksListing the questionable pages or domains that link to your site in a file for Google's disavow links tool in Search Console. Google says most sites won't need to.
• Duplicate contentThe same content reachable at more than one URL, such as HTTP and HTTPS copies or a category page's sorted and filtered versions.
• E-E-A-TGoogle's name for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, aspects of content its ranking systems look for signs of, with trust the most important.
• FaviconThe small square icon for a website that Google can show next to the site's results in Google Search.
• Featured snippetA special Google result box that shows a descriptive snippet from a page first, before the link, chosen automatically by Google's systems.
• Free listingsGoogle's no-cost product listings on Search, Maps, YouTube, the Shopping tab, Images and more, built from the product data you give Merchant Center.
• Google Business ProfileGoogle's free listing for a business on Maps and Search, with its hours, phone number, location, photos and reviews, managed by the owner.
• Google Search ConsoleGoogle's free service that shows site owners how their site does in Google Search, which searches show it, and the problems Google finds with it.
• hreflangAn annotation that tells Google which of your pages are versions of the same content for different languages or regions, so Search can show people the right one.
• HTTPSThe secure version of a web address, which Google strongly recommends for every site and prefers to index when a page has both an HTTP and an HTTPS address.
• ImpressionsHow often someone saw a link to your site on Google, as Search Console counts it in its performance reports for Google Search, Discover and News.
• Keyword stuffingFilling a page with keywords or numbers to try to manipulate Google's rankings, often in unnatural lists or repeated phrases. It breaks Google's spam policies.
• Link spamLinks made to or from a site mainly to manipulate search rankings, such as bought links that pass ranking credit. Google may rank such sites lower or not show them.
• Local rankingHow Google orders nearby businesses in local results on Maps and Search, mainly by how well each matches the search, how far away it is and how well known it is.
• Manual actionGoogle's action against a site when one of its reviewers finds pages that break Google's spam policies. Affected pages can rank lower or drop out of results.
• Merchant listing experiencesGoogle's shopping results for pages where you sell a product, such as popular product results and the shopping knowledge panel, built from Product markup.
• Meta descriptionA short summary of a page in its HTML, which Google may use as the snippet in a search result when it describes the page better than the page's own text.
• Mobile-first indexingGoogle's use of the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with its smartphone agent, to index and rank the site's pages.
• Nofollow linkA link marked with rel="nofollow", which tells Google you'd rather it not associate your site with the linked page, or crawl that page from your site.
• noindexA rule in a page's code or HTTP header that tells Google to leave the page out of its search results. Google has to be able to crawl the page to see it.
• Page experienceHow satisfying a page is to use, judged across many aspects such as loading speed, security, how it shows on phones, ads and pop-ups.
• Product snippetA Google search result for a product page that adds product details such as ratings, review information, price and availability.
• Review snippetA short excerpt of a review or a rating that Google may show, with stars, in search results when the page has valid review or rating structured data.
• Rich resultsSearch results with an enhanced display, such as one for a recipe, that Google can show for pages with structured data.
• robots.txtA file at the root of your site that tells search engine crawlers which addresses they may crawl. It manages crawler traffic; it doesn't keep a page out of Google.
• Site nameThe name of the website Google shows with each search result, chosen automatically for the whole site, separate from each page's title link.
• SitelinksExtra links to pages on the same site that Google sometimes groups under a search result, picked automatically from the site's link structure.
• SitemapA file that lists the pages and files on your site you think are important, so search engines can find and crawl them more efficiently.
• Soft 404 errorA URL that shows visitors a page saying it doesn't exist, or an empty page, while telling Google the request succeeded with a 200 status code.
• Sponsored linkA link in an ad or paid placement, marked with rel="sponsored" in the page's code. It's the value Google prefers for paid links, though it still accepts nofollow.
• Structured dataCode on a page that describes what the page is about in a standard format, such as a recipe's ingredients and cooking time, so search engines can understand it.
• Title linkThe title of a result in Google Search, which links to the page. Google writes it automatically from sources such as the page's title element and main heading.