Search engine optimization, explained
71 guides, 530 sections, about 321 minutes of reading
Newest guides
Newest first. Page 3 of 3.
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What Is a Long-Tail Keyword?
A long-tail keyword is a search query with few searches on its own, such as "women's waterproof trail running shoes for wide feet" compared with the head term "shoes." Low...
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Robots.txt: The Complete Guide to Crawler Access Control
Robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of a site that tells crawlers which URLs they may request. It controls crawling, not indexing, and it works only because...
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What Is a Knowledge Panel? Understanding Brand and Entity SERP Features
A knowledge panel is the information box Google shows when someone searches for an entity it knows: a person, place, organization, or thing. Google's help page on knowledge panels describes...
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What Is Domain Authority? How the Third-Party SEO Metric Works
Domain Authority (DA) is a score from 1 to 100 that Moz, the SEO software company, assigns to a website to estimate how well it is likely to rank compared...
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What Is Technical SEO? The Foundation of Search Visibility
Technical SEO is the work that lets search engines find, crawl, render, and index a site's pages, and that keeps those pages fast, stable, and usable once a visitor arrives....
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What Is Click-Through Rate? The Metric That Connects Visibility to Engagement
Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of a link's impressions that led to a click: clicks divided by impressions. Both are counted events, not people; one searcher can produce several...
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What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research is the process of finding, evaluating, and prioritizing the words and phrases people use when they search, so that content and site structure follow real demand instead of...
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What Is Link Building? Earning Links That Build Authority
Link building is the work of getting other websites to link to yours. The links that build authority are earned: another publisher links because the page is worth citing, not...
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What Is a Manual Action? How Google Penalties Work and How to Recover
A manual action is a penalty applied by a person at Google. Google's Manual Actions report documentation explains that "Google issues a manual action against a site when a human...
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What Is Hreflang and How Does It Work for International SEO
Hreflang is an annotation that tells Google which language and, optionally, which region each version of a page is for. If a site has an English page for the United...
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What Is a Local Pack? How Google's Local Search Results Work
A local pack is the block of business listings, shown with a map, that Google displays for searches with local intent, such as "plumber near me" or "coffee shop downtown."...
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What Are Rich Results? How Structured Data Creates Enhanced Search Listings
Rich results are search listings that show more than a title, a URL, and a text snippet: a recipe with its rating and cooking time, a product with its price...
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What Is Thin Content? Understanding Content Depth and Value
Thin content is a page that gives the reader little of value: little that is original, specific, or useful for the question the page claims to answer. Length is not...
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What Is a Backlink? Why Links Still Matter for SEO
A backlink is a link on one website that points to a page on another. Seen from the receiving site it is an inbound link. Backlinks still matter for SEO...
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What Is HTTPS? Secure Website Communication Explained
HTTPS is HTTP sent over an encrypted connection. The browser and the server agree on keys through Transport Layer Security (TLS), and from then on the data between them cannot...
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What Is a Core Algorithm Update? How Google's Major Ranking Changes Work
A core algorithm update is a broad change Google makes to its main ranking systems several times a year. Google's guide to core updates describes them as "significant, broad changes...
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What Is Keyword Cannibalization and How Do You Fix It
Keyword cannibalization is when two or more pages on the same site target the same search and the same intent and the overlap costs performance: the wrong page ranks, or...
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Keyword Ranking: Understanding and Improving Search Positions
A keyword ranking is the position a page holds in Google's results for a given search. It is not one fixed number: it changes with the searcher's location and device,...
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Canonical Tags: Consolidating Duplicate Content for SEO
A canonical tag is a rel="canonical" link element that tells Google which URL you prefer when the same or nearly the same content is available at several addresses. It consolidates...
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What Is a 301 Redirect and When Should You Use One
A 301 redirect is a server response that says a page has moved permanently to a new URL. Browsers send visitors to the new address, and Google treats the redirect...
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What Is Google Penguin? Google's Link Spam Algorithm Explained
Google Penguin is the algorithm Google introduced in 2012 to act against sites that tried to manipulate rankings with unnatural links. It began as a periodic update and, since September...
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