Pillar Page nounDefinition: A comprehensive, authoritative page that broadly covers a core topic and links out to more specific related subtopics (cluster content). Pillar pages serve as the foundation of a topic cluster strategy to build topical authority and improve internal linking.Usage: “They created a pillar page for...
Platform noun Any website, mobile app, SaaS, or other digital application which allows the public to own accounts that provide data which can be extracted for personal use and/or which acts like a marketplace for businesses or people to peddle wares and services to earn revenue inside of...
Predatory SEO noun A service provider or other malicious actor with administrator access granted to them by a website owner or business that abuses this access to a website in order to use keywords in the website’s copy to build links to their own site or otherwise abuse...
Prompt Surface Area nounDefinition: The breadth of user prompts or queries for which a piece of content is likely to be retrieved, referenced, or influence an LLM’s response. A larger prompt surface area means the content semantically aligns with a wider variety of natural language inputs.Usage: “Expanding their...
Query other versions: Search Query noun The keywords, phrases, or sentences typed or spoken into a search engine in order to find a list of results.“My search query returned over 100 million website results, thankfully the first one is what I was looking for”
ranked entity list nounDefinition: A structured list of entities—such as businesses, products, people, or places—ordered based on relevance, quality, authority, or another defined metric within a specific topical context. Ranked entity lists are commonly used in content such as “best of” articles, directories, and review roundups, and are...
Ranking Factors noun (plural)Definition: Criteria used by search engines to determine how pages are ranked in search results. These factors can include backlinks, content relevance, page speed, mobile usability, structured data, and hundreds of other signals.Usage: “Backlinks and page speed are two of the most influential ranking factors...
Rendering nounDefinition: The stage at which a search engine processes the full page—including JavaScript, CSS, and dynamic content—to understand what the page displays to users. Proper rendering is essential for indexing modern, JavaScript-heavy websites.Usage: “Google’s crawler couldn’t render the reviews section due to blocked JS files.”Compare: Crawling, indexing
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) nounDefinition: A generative AI framework where a large language model retrieves relevant external data—such as documents, web pages, or knowledge base entries—in real time to inform and enhance its generated responses. This approach improves factual accuracy and reduces hallucination by grounding answers in up-to-date or...
robots.txt nounDefinition: A plain text file placed at the root of a website that instructs search engine crawlers which pages or directories should or should not be accessed or indexed. It uses directives like Disallow, Allow, and User-agent.Usage: “The robots.txt file blocked crawlers from accessing the admin dashboard.”Compare:...