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Rankings - Search Engine Ranking
Rankings is a term used to refer to the position achieved in search engine results pages (SERP's) by a website.
RealNames
An alternative web site address system whereby particular words could be registered and pointed to actual URLs.
The system is no longer in use. It relied heavily on support from Microsoft. When Microsoft decided to discontinue
their support, the RealNames system simply did not have the reach it needed to work.
Reciprocal Link
A recirpocal link is one which is obtained by offering a link back to the originating website.
This exchange process benefits both sites as each gains an inbound link. However, the "value" of the link is less
than it would be had either site chosen unilaterally to place a link to the other with no reciprocation.
Recall
A measure of a search engine's ability to return all relevant results. Search engines must find a balance between recall and precision
(The measure of a search engine's ability to return only relevant results). If there are 10 pages about "blue bananas" in a search engine's
database and a search for "blue bananas" returns only 8 of those pages, the recall is scored at 0.8 or 80%. It's important to note that recall
has nothing to do with database size. If another search engine has only 3 pages about blue bananas and returns all 3, its recall is 100%, even
though there are other relevant documents not included in its database.
Redirect
A redirect is any method by which a user is transported from one web location to another without clicking a link or button.
There are many different types of redirect, some of which are initiated by the browser, such as a Meta Refesh, others by a server, such as a 301 response.
Generally, their purpose is to move the user to the correct location when they are currently at an out of date location, although they are sometimes used for user-tracking and other similar activities.
Referrer
The referrer is the website that a user was on immediately before they followed a link to your site.
If the user did not follow a link to your site then there is no referrer.
Relevance
The closeness of a key word or phrase to the subject matter of a web page.
REP - Robots Exclusion Protocol
REP is a system that allows you to instruct (complying) search engines which parts of your web server they should NOT index.
All the major search engines comply with REP, although if you update it, it may take a few days for the robots to change their indexing habits.
REP is useful for protecting private files (although conversely it also 'signposts' them to less-reputable software), and also for reducing unnecessary bandwidth usage.
Re-submissionre-submission
The process of submitting a web page to a search engine and then repeating the submission process - either a couple of times or regularly over a period of time. Contrary to popular belief,
regular re-submission does not improve a page's ranking and is considered a form of spamdexing by most search engines.
Robots, Crawlers
Robots are the bits of software used by search engines to read your website during indexing.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is the file used by Robots Exclusion Protocol to instruct search engine robots what not to index.
It has the following syntax:
User-agent: {useragent}
Disallow: {directory or file}
It is incorrect syntax to attempt to explicitly allow directories or files, and this may cause the robots.txt file to fail, leaving a whole website unprotected.
RSS - Really Simple Syndication
RSS is a standard protocol used to syndicate content from one website to others, usually syndicate news and opinion.
RSS is sometimes refered to as 'automated news feeds'.
For more information...