Glossary Terms
P & Q
Page, Larry
Co-founder of Google.
PageRank
A logarithmic scale based on link equity which estimates the importance of web documents.
Since PageRank is widely bartered Google's relevancy algorithms had to move away from relying on
PageRank and place more emphasis on trusted links via algorithms such as TrustRank.
The PageRank formula is:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
PR= PageRank
d= dampening factor (~0.85)
c = number of links on the page
PR(T1)/C(T1) = PageRank of page 1 divided by the total number of links on page 1, (transferred PageRank)
In text: for any given page A the PageRank PR(A) is equal to the sum of the parsed partial PageRank given
from each page pointing at it multiplied by the dampening factor plus one minus the dampening factor.
See also:
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
Page Title (see Title)
Paid Inclusion
A method of allowing websites which pass editorial quality guidelines to buy relevant exposure.
See also:
Directories such as the Yahoo! Directory and Business.com allow websites to be listed for a flat yearly cost.
Yahoo! Search allows webmasters to pay for inclusion for a flat review fee and a category based cost per
click.
Paid Link (see Text Link Ads)
Pay for Performance
Payment structure where affiliated sales workers are paid commission for getting consumers to perform
certain actions.
Publishers publishing contextual ads are typically paid per ad click. Affiliate marketing programs pay affiliates
for conversions - leads, downloads, or sales.
Penalty
Search engines prevent some websites suspected of spamming from ranking highly in the results by banning
or penalizing them. These penalties may be automated algorithmically or manually applied.
If a site is penalized algorithmically the site may start ranking again after a certain period of time after the
reason for being penalized is fixed. If a site is penalized manually the penalty may last an exceptionally long
time or require contacting the search engine with a reinclusion request to remedy.
Some sites are also filtered for various reasons.
See also:
Google -30 rank penalty - an example of a penalty
Personalization
Altering the search results based on a person's location, search history, content they recently viewed, or
other factors relevant to them on a personal level.
PHP
PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source server side scripting language used to render web pages or
add interactivity to them.
See also:
PHP.net
Poison Word
Words which were traditionally associated with low quality content that caused search engines to want to
demote the rankings of a page.
See also:
What Are Poison Words? Do They Matter?
PDF
Portable Document Format is a universal file format developed by Adobe Systems that allows files to be
stored and viewed in the original printer friendly context.
Portal
Web site offering common consumer services such as news, email, other content, and search.
PPC
Pay Per Click is a pricing model which most search ads and many contextual ad programs are sold through.
PPC ads only charge advertisers if a potential customer clicks on an ad.
See also:
AdWords - Google's PPC ad platform
AdCenter - Microsoft's PPC ad platform
Yahoo! Search Marketing - Yahoo!'s PPC ad platform
Precision
The ability of a search engine to list results that satisfy the query, usually measured in percentage. (if 20 of
the 50 results match the query the precision is 40%)
Search spam and the complexity of language challenge the precision of search engines.
Profit Elasticity
A measure of the profit potential of different economic conditions based on adjusting price, supply, or other
variables to create a different profit potential where the supply and demand curves cross.
Proximity
A measure of how close words are to one another.
A page which has words near one another may be deemed to be more likely to satisfy a search query
containing both terms. If keyword phrases are repeated an excessive number of times, and the proximity is
close on all the occurrences of both words it may also be a sign of unnatural (and thus potentially low quality)
content.
Q
Quality Content
Content which is linkworthy in nature.
See also:
What is Quality Content?
When Unique Content is Not "Unique"
Quality Link
Search engines count links votes of trust. Quality links count more than low quality links.
There are a variety of ways to define what a quality link is, but the following are characteristics of a high
quality link:
Trusted Source: If a link is from a page or website which seems like it is trustworthy then it is more likely to
count more than a link from an obscure, rarely used, and rarely cited website. See TrustRank for one
example of a way to find highly trusted websites.
Hard to Get: The harder a link is to acquire the more likely a search engine will be to want to trust it and the
more work a competitor will need to do to try to gain that link.
Aged: Some search engines may trust links from older resources or links that have existed for a length of
time more than they trust brand new links or links from newer resources.
Co-citation: Pages that link at competing sites which also link to your site make it easy for search engines to
understand what community your website belongs to. See Hilltop for an example of an algorithm which looks
for co-citation from expert sources.
Related: Links from related pages or related websites may count more than links from unrelated sites.
In Content: Links which are in the content area of a page are typically going to be more likely to be editorial
links than links that are not included within the editorial portion of a page.
While appropriate anchor text may also help you rank even better than a link which lacks appropriate anchor
text, it is worth noting that for competitive queries Google is more likely to place weight on a high quality link
where the anchor text does not match than trusting low quality links where the anchor text matches.
Query
The actual "search string" a searcher enters into a search engine.
Query Refinement
Some searchers may refine their search query if they deemed the results as being irrelevant. Some search
engines may aim to promote certain verticals or suggest other search queries if they deem other search
queries or vertical databases as being relevant to the goals of the searcher.
Query refinement is both a manual and an automated process. If searchers do not find their search results
as being relevant they may search again. Search engines may also automatically refine queries using the
following techniques:
Google OneBox: promotes a vertical search database near the top of the search result. For example, if
image search is relevant to your search query images may be placed near the top of the search results.
Spell Correction: offers a did you mean link with the correct spelling near the top of the results.
Inline Suggest: offers related search results in the search results. Some engines also suggest a variety of
related search queries.
Some search toolbars also aim to help searchers auto complete their search queries by offering a list of most
popular queries which match the starting letters that a searcher enters into the search box.
R
P & Q
Page, Larry
Co-founder of Google.
PageRank
A logarithmic scale based on link equity which estimates the importance of web documents.
Since PageRank is widely bartered Google's relevancy algorithms had to move away from relying on
PageRank and place more emphasis on trusted links via algorithms such as TrustRank.
The PageRank formula is:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
PR= PageRank
d= dampening factor (~0.85)
c = number of links on the page
PR(T1)/C(T1) = PageRank of page 1 divided by the total number of links on page 1, (transferred PageRank)
In text: for any given page A the PageRank PR(A) is equal to the sum of the parsed partial PageRank given
from each page pointing at it multiplied by the dampening factor plus one minus the dampening factor.
See also:
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
Page Title (see Title)
Paid Inclusion
A method of allowing websites which pass editorial quality guidelines to buy relevant exposure.
See also:
Directories such as the Yahoo! Directory and Business.com allow websites to be listed for a flat yearly cost.
Yahoo! Search allows webmasters to pay for inclusion for a flat review fee and a category based cost per
click.
Paid Link (see Text Link Ads)
Pay for Performance
Payment structure where affiliated sales workers are paid commission for getting consumers to perform
certain actions.
Publishers publishing contextual ads are typically paid per ad click. Affiliate marketing programs pay affiliates
for conversions - leads, downloads, or sales.
Penalty
Search engines prevent some websites suspected of spamming from ranking highly in the results by banning
or penalizing them. These penalties may be automated algorithmically or manually applied.
If a site is penalized algorithmically the site may start ranking again after a certain period of time after the
reason for being penalized is fixed. If a site is penalized manually the penalty may last an exceptionally long
time or require contacting the search engine with a reinclusion request to remedy.
Some sites are also filtered for various reasons.
See also:
Google -30 rank penalty - an example of a penalty
Personalization
Altering the search results based on a person's location, search history, content they recently viewed, or
other factors relevant to them on a personal level.
PHP
PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source server side scripting language used to render web pages or
add interactivity to them.
See also:
PHP.net
Poison Word
Words which were traditionally associated with low quality content that caused search engines to want to
demote the rankings of a page.
See also:
What Are Poison Words? Do They Matter?
Portable Document Format is a universal file format developed by Adobe Systems that allows files to be
stored and viewed in the original printer friendly context.
Portal
Web site offering common consumer services such as news, email, other content, and search.
PPC
Pay Per Click is a pricing model which most search ads and many contextual ad programs are sold through.
PPC ads only charge advertisers if a potential customer clicks on an ad.
See also:
AdWords - Google's PPC ad platform
AdCenter - Microsoft's PPC ad platform
Yahoo! Search Marketing - Yahoo!'s PPC ad platform
Precision
The ability of a search engine to list results that satisfy the query, usually measured in percentage. (if 20 of
the 50 results match the query the precision is 40%)
Search spam and the complexity of language challenge the precision of search engines.
Profit Elasticity
A measure of the profit potential of different economic conditions based on adjusting price, supply, or other
variables to create a different profit potential where the supply and demand curves cross.
Proximity
A measure of how close words are to one another.
A page which has words near one another may be deemed to be more likely to satisfy a search query
containing both terms. If keyword phrases are repeated an excessive number of times, and the proximity is
close on all the occurrences of both words it may also be a sign of unnatural (and thus potentially low quality)
content.
Q
Quality Content
Content which is linkworthy in nature.
See also:
What is Quality Content?
When Unique Content is Not "Unique"
Quality Link
Search engines count links votes of trust. Quality links count more than low quality links.
There are a variety of ways to define what a quality link is, but the following are characteristics of a high
quality link:
Trusted Source: If a link is from a page or website which seems like it is trustworthy then it is more likely to
count more than a link from an obscure, rarely used, and rarely cited website. See TrustRank for one
example of a way to find highly trusted websites.
Hard to Get: The harder a link is to acquire the more likely a search engine will be to want to trust it and the
more work a competitor will need to do to try to gain that link.
Aged: Some search engines may trust links from older resources or links that have existed for a length of
time more than they trust brand new links or links from newer resources.
Co-citation: Pages that link at competing sites which also link to your site make it easy for search engines to
understand what community your website belongs to. See Hilltop for an example of an algorithm which looks
for co-citation from expert sources.
Related: Links from related pages or related websites may count more than links from unrelated sites.
In Content: Links which are in the content area of a page are typically going to be more likely to be editorial
links than links that are not included within the editorial portion of a page.
While appropriate anchor text may also help you rank even better than a link which lacks appropriate anchor
text, it is worth noting that for competitive queries Google is more likely to place weight on a high quality link
where the anchor text does not match than trusting low quality links where the anchor text matches.
Query
The actual "search string" a searcher enters into a search engine.
Query Refinement
Some searchers may refine their search query if they deemed the results as being irrelevant. Some search
engines may aim to promote certain verticals or suggest other search queries if they deem other search
queries or vertical databases as being relevant to the goals of the searcher.
Query refinement is both a manual and an automated process. If searchers do not find their search results
as being relevant they may search again. Search engines may also automatically refine queries using the
following techniques:
Google OneBox: promotes a vertical search database near the top of the search result. For example, if
image search is relevant to your search query images may be placed near the top of the search results.
Spell Correction: offers a did you mean link with the correct spelling near the top of the results.
Inline Suggest: offers related search results in the search results. Some engines also suggest a variety of
related search queries.
Some search toolbars also aim to help searchers auto complete their search queries by offering a list of most
popular queries which match the starting letters that a searcher enters into the search box.
R
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