Bow-to-Stern Latency – Noun phrase. The amount of time that elapses from when a search engine caches the deepest reachable page after the last time it caches the root URL of the site.

Cache-to-Ranking Latency – Noun phrase. The length of time that elapses from a page’s contents being reported in a search engine cache image until the page contents are found for specific queries.

Clustered Results – Noun phrase. You see this most often with Ask, but it happens in Google quite a bit and I think Yahoo! also does it sometimes. You’ll see 2 pages from the same site, the 2nd one indented. Now, Ask likes to put little folders in the margin to show how smart they are about clustering search results from multiple sites under a single topic. But did you know that Google clusters sites and hides them from you? If you change your Google Preferences to show more than ten listings per page, you’ll see the clustered listings. That is why so many data center tools show you different rankings from what you think you’re seeing.

Collapsed Results or Collapsed Listings – Noun phrases. Usually what I call Clustered Results when I cannot think of the word “cluster” (which is more often than not). Technically, these expressions should really only refer to the hidden clusters described above.

Crawl-to-Cache-Time – Noun phrase. The amount of time that elapses from when a search engine fetches a page from a Web site until the page’s contents appear in the search engine’s cache report for the page. Abbreviated as CCT.

Crawl-to-Passed-Value Time or Crawl-to-Passed-Value Latency – Noun phrases. The amount of time that elapses from when a search engine fetches a page until the links on the page pass value (PageRank or anchor text) to their destinations.

Crawl-to-Ranking Time – Noun phrase. The amount of time that elapses from when a search engine fetches a page from a Web site until the page is returned in the top ten results for a designated query.

FCP – Acronym. Frequently Cached Page. A page that is crawled and cached by a search engine on a very frequent basis, usually every two weeks or less.

Filter – Noun. A process whereby a Web document is evaluated and either flagged as “spam”, “potential spam”, “adult-oriented content”, “illegal content”, or something else. Each search engine employs multiple filters. Some filters were designed into the algorithms from the start. Some filters have been added as afterthoughts as search engines have had to react to manipulative or otherwise previously undetected inappropriate content.

Filthy Linking Rich Principle – Noun phrase. The more links a document has accrued, the more links the document will accrue. Stated another way, the more visible a document is in search engine results, the more likely the document is to accrue links, and hence the more visible the document becomes in search engine results.

First Visibility Principle – Noun phrase. The first document to cross the Idiot threshold (q.v.) becomes the first authority on the topic.

Fuzzy point – Noun phrase. The approximate state of knowledge where the information about a document’s indexing status and information about the number of queries to which the document is relevant are approximately equal.

Host – Noun. A much-used term in academic search engineering literature to distinguish between “Web document collections” on a systemic level. A host is not necessarily the same as a site. Hosts are generally defined to be either entire domains (example.com) or sub-domains (sub1.example.com). A domain to which one or more sub-domains belong would be treated as multiple individual hosts, distinct from one another. A host is easier to identify than a Web site, which may be only a part of a host’s content.

Idiot Threshold – Noun phrase. A figurative status at which a document has accrued enough meaningless links through word-of-mouth that the document assumes the status of being an authority on a topic.

Index – Noun. The database(s) against which queries are resolved. All of the major search engines maintain multiple indexes. Each is a separate, distinct database, either physically (kept in separate files) or virtually (logically segmented portions of a master database). The expression database is probably inappropriate for describing what the search engines maintain. When you see me refer to Main Index, think of that as the “static Web page index”. Other indexes may include Image Indexes, News Indexes, and Blog Indexes. I have some ideas on how these various indexes are built, but I don’t expect to share them on this blog.

Index – Verb. The process of adding information about Web content to a search engine’s database about the Web. The indexing process may entail considerable effort depending upon the complexity and applicability of the document.

Indexer – Noun. A type of program that search engines use to update their databases with information about retrieved and parsed Web documents. You rarely see even knowledgeable SEO forum moderators and admins speak of indexers and parsers, perhaps out of a misguided concern that they will confuse people who are new to search engine optimization. Unfortunately, those new people visit the forums to learn about SEO, so teaching them the wrong terminology does them a great disservice.

Influencer – Noun. A Web site or individual whose content is deemed to be influential in adjusting search result (q.v.) rankings, usually either through the creation of new content or the placement of links to other documents. Some blogs (q.v.) can be powerful influencers.

Internal Links or Internal Linkage – Noun phrase. These are the links within your own site that point to other pages in your site. Search engines may use a different, host-level definition for internal links. It is possible that all the major search engines now distinguish between host-internal and host-external links. See host for more information.

Internal PageRank – Noun phrase. This is the actual static value that Google computes and adds to dynamic (run-time, query-time) relevance scores to determine search results rankings. Matt Cutts distinguished between Internal PageRank and Toolbar PageRank on his blog. He also confirmed that he was talking about Internal PageRank where I cited him in my PageRank: Where it helps, where it doesn’t help, and other facts post at Spider-Food in July 2006. Most SEO forum moderators and admins appear to be speaking about Internal PageRank when they discuss PageRank at all, except where they qualify their remarks to address the Toolbar PR value (that nearly all moderators and admins now tell people to ignore). The Toolbar PR value is a proxy value and it is only published 3-4 times a year, making it a virtually worthless indicator of quality or value.

Link mass – Noun phrase. The combination of all connected links that lead to any given page in a hypertext document collection. Absolute link mass cannot be measured. Relative link mass can be approximately measured.

Link pathway – Noun phrase. Two or more pages connected as in a chain (a “path”) by hypertext links.

Link pathway segment – Noun phrase. A segment or portion of a larger link pathway at least 1 document long and at least 2 documents shorter than the link pathway (the beginning and terminating documents in the link pathway cannot be in the link pathway segment).

Link Trap – Noun phrase. Similar to a link bait page, a link trap is usually built by cheaters in reciprocal linking schemes where the outbound links are designed not to pass value.

MCP – Acronym. Moderately Cached Page. A page that is crawled and cached by a search engine on an occasional basis, usually every two to six weeks.

Opacity – Noun. A metric or measure of a range of search listings (q.v.) for a query which are not obviously optimized to be included in the search results. A perfectly opaque search result (q.v.) has an Opacity value of 1.0, reflecting the fact that none of the search listings (q.v.) are obviously optimized for placement in the result.

Page Zone, or Zone – Noun phrase, noun. An arbitrarily designated visible portion of a Web page. Page zones are used for advertising and link placement.

PageRank Trap – Noun phrase. A specialized form of link bait, a PageRank trap is a page whose outbound links only point to other pages on the same domain or site. Usually an article or forum discussion thread that attracts links from other sites.

Parser – Noun. A type of program used by search engines to break down your HTML pages into components for indexing. The parser strips your indexable content and passes it to one or more indexers. Many SEO forum moderators and admins who should know better continue to speak of “spiders” doing the parsing and indexing. Spiders basically retrieve files and place them into (search engine internal) queing areas for the parsers to munch on.

Partially Indexed Listings – Noun phrase. See URL Listings below.

Preservation, or Preservation Principle – Noun, noun phrase. The belief that a Web site can retain all or most of its PageRank by “hoarding” or “sculpting” PageRank. The Preservation Principle is an SEO myth.

Quality Links – Noun phrase. A nonsense expression with no real value or purpose other than to act as a catchall for the types of links people think are better than “those other links”. Googlers use “quality links” as a subtle way of telling people to stop getting cheap spammy links. Many SEO forum moderators and admins use “quality links” in a somewhat broader but similar fashion, if only because they don’t know exactly what criteria make links good for any particular search engine but they recognize that people who are asking about linkage have a problem. Nearly everyone else seems to use the expression to refer to their (usually non-performing) backlinks. I wrote about high quality links at SEOmoz (in a post designed to rank for “high quality links” on the basis of content — but the lesson passed over everyone’s head, except for Aaron Pratt who saw what I was doing right away).

Saturation – Noun. 1) The extent to which a Web site’s pages are included in a search engine index. 2) The extent to which a Web site’s pages appear in a given query’s search result. 3) The extent to which a link profile is distributed across a Web site’s pages.

SERP – Acronym for Search Engine Results Page. Everyone seems to know this acronym by now. I have always hated it even though I now reluctantly use it. SRP (search results page) would be better, since it’s all inclusive. You can have a DRP (Directory Results Page) which some people might argue should be called a DSRP (Directory Search Results Page). I still get click throughs from Yahoo! and DMOZ directory page listings (or a DLP, Directory Listings Page).

Sitelinks – Noun. Google invented this term, which is better than my classic “little clustered links under the main listing”. Sitelinks are those “little clustered links under the main listing” that deep link into the site by category or topic. Many people wonder how these Sitelinks appear. Googlers always say, “That’s algorithmically determined and we have no control over them” — meaning, “We wrote special commands into our software to create those things and we’re not going to tell you what criteria are used to decide which sites get them.” My best guess is that sites that have more than 1,000 pages of content, clear content categorization in their non-breadcrumb internal links, and lots of deep links from other domains are good candidates for Sitelinks. Other criteria are probably taken into consideration. Sitelinks are only shown for the top listing in a popular query result.

Sitemap – Noun. A page on your Web site that links to all the other pages, or at least to all the important section top-level pages. Google has usurped this expression for their “Google Sitemaps” feature (now incorporated into the XML Sitemaps standard supported by several major search engines), where you can upload a file listing all of your pages for their crawlers. I have noticed that Googlers are now speaking of HTML Sitemaps to distinguish those Web site pages from the XML Sitemaps. I think it would be best if everyone adopted the convention of saying “XML Sitemap” or “HTML Sitemap” so we are all on the same page.

Transparency – Noun. A metric or measure of a range of search listings (q.v.) for a query which are obviously optimized to be included in the search results. A perfectly transparent search result (q.v.) has a Transparency value of 1.0, reflecting the fact that all of its listings are obviously optimized for inclusion in the search result.

Trust – Noun. Currently the latest SEO buzz word. Generally speaking, the SEO community picks up on a concept about six months to two years after it’s been worked through by the search engineers. Hardcore spammers (the ultimate “Black Hat” SEOs) are usually pretty good at detecting trends before everyone else. Trust has now officially been done to death. It is incorporated into every algorithm (including Windows Live even though we all agree that Microsoft still has a way to go) and the search engines are already looking at other issues. Trust is being placed in the hands of the Webmasters, but most Webmasters don’t seem to want the responsibility.

Update – Noun. From the SEO side, an update is any noticeable change to the way a search engine behaves. From the search engines’ side, an update is any intended change in a search engine’s makeup or data. Matt Cutts offers an incomplete explanation of a Google update in his December 2006 Explaining Algorithm Updates and Data Refreshes post. He wrote a similar post in September 2005 with What’s An Update?. I don’t expect Matt to confirm every algorithmic change. That would pretty much defeat the purpose of many of them. Yahoo! and Windows Live occasionally issue “weather reports”. Matt has informally issued some on Google’s behalf.

Uncertainty Principle of SEO – Noun phrase. The two states of a Web document (indexed and relevance to a given set of queries) cannot be determined at the same time. The more queries to which a page is known to be relevant, the less information about the page’s indexing status can be determined. The more information about a page’s indexing status that is known, the fewer queries to which the page is relevant.

Universal Search – Noun phrase. The practice by major search engines like Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo! of melding results from several search databases to provide the user with a more diverse selection of search listings (usually combining video, news, blog, Web, book, and other search tools).

Universal Search Injection – Noun phrase. The practice by Universal Search-capable services of augmenting search results (q.v.) with additional, supplemental listings not normally included in the standard 1..10 listings. Universal Search Injection listings usually have more complex structures, provide more information, and are more transient in nature than normal search listings (q.v.). Universal Search Injections may include links to several documents.

URL Listings or URL-only Listings – Noun phrase. These are the site listings that appear in Google with nothing more than a URL. Matt Cutts explained that they are uncrawled links that Google knows something about from inbound linkage. Google will (or used to) occasionally pull a description from the Open Directory Project for uncrawled links, but you often see them without any description at all. Uncrawled links are not shown in Google’s SafeSearch mode. Matt also discussed them here.

Validate – Verb. Every time I use this word people reach for their W3C manuals. When I speak of search engines validating Web sites, I don’t mean they are looking to see if the HTML code meets some arbitrary standard. I mean they pass each URL through a process whereby they establish, according to their own criteria, that the site is “not spam”. Many spam sites appear to validate. The search engines are not perfect. Nonetheless, many spam sites don’t last long because they don’t validate or their validation is revoked. Maybe I could have used a better expression, but I can’t think of one.

There are not many people whom I would regard as “SEO theorists”: real thinkers who do first-line research, formulate their thoughts, and share their conclusions. A fair number of spammers practice the SEO Method (Experiment. Evaluate. Adjust.) but they are more practitioners of applied SEO science than developmental theorists. A lot of spammers hang tight and share ideas without being very methodical.

Among the real theorists you have a few content-is-king creedists and nearly everyone else is a link apologist. Neither group pays much attention to what the other group says. The spammers are most influenced by the link apologists, who also influence a large portion of the general SEO community. Link apologetics are published on the Web every day. Link apologists rule the field.

I consider myself to be a generalist. I can build the links when I need to. I can evaluate the links when I need to. But I also devote a lot of time and energy to studying the dynamics of content theory. Search engines have to score documents for relevance. Now, I could study Information Retrieval Science and understand the basic principles of scoring documents but that won’t tell me much about why a specific document ranks well in search results.

Like it or not search engines use two ingredients to build their results: links and content. If you want to succeed in manipulating search engine results you need both links and content. You don’t need to understand the algorithms in order to use the tools that theorists have provided through the years. In fact, most of today’s leading SEOs really do not understand the algorithms — but they are leaders because they use the tools and ideas they have inherited successfully.

There really isn’t all that much you need to know about links: some links pass value and some links don’t. The more value-passing links you get, the more you can manipulate search results. Most people stop there and act like they have discovered the Unified Field Theory.

If you want to understand the dynamics of links you can look at link age, link placement, link anchor text, link data, etc. Links don’t just influence search results. They also influence people.

But content is a much more complex ingredient than links. Most link apologists just don’t grasp the value of content. You can almost always separate the link apologists from the content apologists in any group of SEOs by asking how many queries they optimize for. Anyone who tells you they go for a small number of queries is almost certainly depending on links. Anyone who tells you they optimize for hundreds or thousands of queries is either lying or works extensively with content.

As of this writing today, the SEO Theory blog targets (and ranks in the top 10 for) over 200 queries. This blog has only existed since December 2006 and we moved it to its own domain in February 2007. I have placed fewer than 20 links on other Web sites to this blog. I have not asked other people to link to it. I have not purchased any links for it. I have not really even made an effort to promote the blog.

And yet despite the fact that SEO Theory ranks highly for over 200 targeted expressions (all of which send traffic to the blog), and despite the fact that I don’t actively promote SEO Theory (much), between 70% and 80% of all traffic to SEO Theory arrives from non-search sources. About 51% of you come here directly: you either type the URL in or you click on links in your Favorites menus in your browsers. Most weeks 20-25% of our visitors come from search engines (mostly Google).

I do use internal linkage to reinforce relevance for some keywords. But I make liberal use of the standard tools available to every Web copywriter to build relevance for targeted expressions: repetition, bolding, italics, Hx headings, page titles, and page URLs.

Using only the principles I write about on this blog I have built up a loyal audience of about 800-1000 readers (some of whom only visit once or twice a month, but they generally spend 15-30 minutes catching up with the various posts). More than 1,000 unique visitors come by every month, many of them come by often. And here is the secret to my slow, plodding success: you didn’t find me. I found you.

You came when I called you. You found something you wanted to read, but I had to figure out what you wanted to read and put it here where you would stumble across it.

Some of you arrive through the links pointing to this site from other sites. Some of you arrive through the SERPs. Many of you arrive from links embedded in your email (which you can attest I did not send out). I don’t know why you are here. I only know that you are drawn to my content because it meets some need you feel.

That’s Web marketing, but given that hundreds of queries bring visitors from search engines every month I think it’s fair to say that SEO Theory does a pretty good job of optimizing for search.

I use three sources of information to determine what I will write and how I will optimize for it: first, I draw upon my own personal experience. Second, I look at popular SEO topics and study the queries they inspire. Third, I look at the search referral statistics this domain records.

My personal SEO experience extends back over 9 years. I have been optimizing Web sites since the summer of 1998, when I realized I was not getting traffic from search engines and I subscribed to the Virtual Promote newsletter. I learned most of what I have needed to know in that first year of interacting with the professional Web marketing community. I have never stopped learning since then. I still occasionally do free Web site reviews and evaluations to help other people, but also to help me learn about what is happening on the Web today.

I get popular SEO topics from forums and blogs. I visit more forums and blogs than I link to from SEO Theory. Most of them are not very interesting, in my opinion, because they deal with the same old stuff that SEO forums blogs have always dealt with. Many of them are now social media forums and blogs and they very rarely have much content about search engine optimization. And most of their search engine optimization content is about links, especially links coming from social media. And that’s just not very interesting to me.

Still, I occasionally see a trend in true SEO topics and I’ll write about that trend. I’ve covered trends such as Supplemental Page optimization, Backlink Theory, and Web spam analysis (to name a few). People are always interested in Web spam either because it clutters up their search results or they believe the Web spammers are making more money than anyone else (if that were true, I would be pushing out MFAs by the thousand). Some Web spammers make a lot of money. Most, by their own admissions in various dark corners of the Web, don’t.

Finally, you tell me what you’re looking for by searching for it and coming to SEO Theory. Many of the most interesting query results don’t include this site in the top 20 listings. Some of you look several pages deep into your search results to find my posts. If I am particularly amused or intrigued by a query I’ll write something about that expression and optimize for it. In doing so I’ve found a few gems that produce steady traffic.

Last year everyone was talking about “optimizing for the long tail of search”. But that euphoria seems to have died down now — as it always does (because this topic has been popular before). Now we’re back to reading news blogs and “SEO” blogs that focus on Web 2.0, 3-D Web (which I would prefer to call ThirdGen Web), and social media links. And most of the news about social media links seems to be that the social media sites don’t want SEOs using them to build links.

Gee. Where have I heard that complaint before?

Every time I see someone complain in an SEO forum about their inability to rank and draw traffic from the search engines, I am tempted to ask them, “How much copy did you create today?” How many new pages of content — real, wordy content that someone has to spend time to read — did you write today? All you need is a blog. A lot of SEOs dispense that advice but when you look at their blogs basically all they do is link out to other blogs. Sorry, but that link won’t pass enough value for me.

Back in 1998 I was rejecting 2 out of 3 site submissions for my Xena: Warrior Princess directory because those new sites usually just grabbed a logo for the television show and linked to the top 5-10 listings from search engines. Yawn. I finally put up a notice on the dircetory’s front page saying, “Hey, if you want to be included in this directory, write something!”

You’ll never find a long blogroll here at SEO Theory because most people don’t actually write anything on their blogs. They just post lists of links. They’re not optimizing. They may be practicing what they preach (linking) but they are trapped in the “I need links from my buddies” zone. When I look at the backlinks for SEO Theory, most of them seem to come from blogs and people I’ve never heard of before. I’m not counting on my SEO friends to link to my every post and tell their jaded, bleary-eyed readers that “Michael Martinez has done it again! Go and check out SEO Theory because he has the greatest list of links to other blogs today!”

If you all you can think of is to slap down a cheap list of links for your hard-earned blog readers, then maybe it’s time for you to shut down your blog. We don’t need any stinkin’ links.

If someone takes the time to type a query into a search engine, they are looking for real content. If they click through to one of your blog posts and that post doesn’t really address their concern, what does that tell you? It tells you that they cannot find what they are looking for and that they are hoping you’ll give it to them. So what if you come in a day or two late? Major search engines tell us that about 20-30% of their queries have never been seen before. The chances that someone else will use the query you just optimized for are in your favor. And if you hit the top 5 listings for that query the odds are better that the query provides steady traffic for you.

Ranking 1st in 1,000 queries that produce 1 visitor per day is preferable to fighting for 1st position in 1 or 2 queries that produce 200-300 visitors a day. If you can satisfy 1,000 needs a day, you’re doing pretty good, aren’t you?

The average visitor clicks on 1.8 pages per visit here at SEO Theory. What does that tell you? It tells you that after reading whatever page they landed on, new arrivals click through to the main blog URL to see what else I have written.

The average visitor started out spending about 1.5 minutes per visit to SEO Theory in December. Now they spend about 3 minutes per visit. What does that tell you? It tells you that people are staying around to read the site. It tells you that people like what they find here.

Now maybe I’m a little more polished at blathering out thoughts than some people. I get lucky every now and then. But there is only one way to become a good writer or even a great writer. You have to write.

If your 100,000-page ecommerce site isn’t drawing in thousands of referrals every day, don’t panic. Your blog might and you can write about thousands of articles without having to name prices. Just link to the appropriate page in the inventory section. So it will take you a little time to build search visibility. That’s no reason not to take on the big task. It is very easy to achieve rankings for nearly 100 SEO questions because most people never optimize for them. The same is true of your inventory.

You don’t have to limit yourself to optimizing for one query in each post. If I can nail a few dozen at a time, you can nail a few dozen at a time. If you miss a few with each post, don’t panic. You have plenty of opportunity to try it agani.

Long tail optimization has always been part of search engine optimization. In the old days we just didn’t know what to call it but this advice goes way back before the days when everyone started screaming and hollaring about links. Content is not a means toward the end of accumulating links. In fact, some people have openly acknowledged that DIGG traffic doesn’t convert well. DIGG and Adsense don’t share the Web very well.

Link spammers promoting their cheap “by-the-book” SEO services helped inundate Ickipedia with trashy links and the Ickicommunity responded by appending “rel=’nofollow’” to most outbound links. Many Web forums have now turned off signatures, links in profiles, and other so-called “SEO friendly” features to discourage link drops in their discussions. Parasitical link building really only irritates people and has no lasting effect. Once you become dependent upon cheap spam links you commit yourself to a neverending cycle of desperate cloying actions.

With content, you can write it once, write it a hundred times, and it never goes away. If a page goes Supplemental all you have to do is link to it. In most cases pages will come back from the Supplemental depths thanks to a few good links from sibling pages. You may write some golden pages that bring in lots of unexpected traffic. And you’ll build out your foundation for link building considerably, if you want to take on more competitive queries.

Remember, real SEO works with both content and links and it doesn’t treat either ingredient as being more important than the other. You have to have both, but if you build the content first, you’ll find that the links come more easily — especially the links you embed for yourself in your own growing inventory of content. Content isn’t king. Links aren’t king. They are both your vassals in your ever-expanding empire of Web and search visibility.