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Sandbox
Allegedly used by one large search engine as a probation period for new sites. Gaining a high PageRank is inhibited during this period.
Scooter
The name of AltaVista's spider. (The name refers to the annual motorcycle races held at the famous AltaVista Raceway).
Score
Search engines usually arrange search results from the most relevant to the least relevant (as determined by the search engine's algorithm).
In order to rank documents, the search engine assigns a score to each page and those with the highest scores are listed first.
Most search engines simply give the maximum score to the most relevant document and score all other relevant documents relative to that document.
Others compare all documents to a theoretically perfect document. The score of a web page therefore refers to its relevance as perceived by a specific
search engine.
Scored keyword phrase
Name given to phrases that searchers use that are tracked by a system the records the number of times the phrase was used in a search, also known as the score.
Search Engine
A site or software that enables users to search a database of web pages, documents and/or other information. Contextually defined, a search engine's primary
function is to deliver relevant matches to human-entered search queries.
Search Engine Friendly
A web page designed and optimized for high search engine rankings. Such pages are rich in keywords and structured for ease of crawling.
Search Engine Optimization
Planning and adjusting the content of a web page in order to improve its position in natural search results, including modifications to code and displayed content.
Search Engine Results Page
The page(s) that display the results of a search.
Search hours
The actual amount of time (in hours) all visitors to a search engine spent there during a given month. Audience reach and search hours are the two major factors
when calculating the popularity of a search engine.
Searchjacking
A variation of spamdexing where pages are optimized for popular search terms even though those terms are not related to the page content.
In the long run this technique makes little sense, as it attracts mostly untargeted visitors.
Search terms
Words entered into a search engine's search box to form a query.
SEM
Any marketing activity involving a search site, including advertising on search result pages, paying for placement and/or Search Engine Optimization.
SERP(S)
Search Engine Results Page(s). The term refers to the page of search results a search engine displays in response to a query.
Semantic Web
An extension of the current Web that provides an easier way to find, share, reuse and combine information more easily.
It is based on machine-readable information and builds on XML technology's capability to define customized tagging schemes and RDF's (
Resource Description Framework) flexible approach to representing data. The Semantic Web provides common formats for interchange of data
(where on the Web there is only interchange of documents). It also provides a common language for recording how the data relates to
real world objects, allowing a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases
which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.
SEMPO
Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. A non-profit organization promoting awareness and interest in search engine marketing.
Shopping Search Engine
A search engine that specializes in delivering product prices and comparative information.
Shadow domain
Also known as a "ghost domain", referring to a domain used to funnel traffic (or link popularity) to a site. Typically it would involve
setting up a throwaway domain and either automatically redirecting visitors to the "real site" or just linking to it. Both uses are considered
spam by most of the major search engines.
Siphoning
A collective name for the different techniques used to steal traffic from another site. For example the use of another's trade name in the title tag etc.
Site map
A site map (or sitemap) is a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.
While some developers argue that site index is a more appropriately used term to relay page function, web visitors are used to seeing each term and generally associate both as one and the same.
Skewing
A technique used by search engines. It refers to the practice of artificially altering the search results so that certain documents will score well on certain queries.
Sniffer
The name of a program that Infoseek used to "sniff out" attempts at spamdexing.
Snippet
Referring to the quoted pieces of page content search engines like Google use on the SERPs instead of a traditional, webmaster created site descriptions.
The term originates from the "NOSNIPPET" robots meta tag used to disallow SNIPPETS.
SOA
An application architecture in which all functions, or services, are defined using a description language and have invokable interfaces that are called to perform business processes.
Each interaction is independent of each and every other interaction and the interconnect protocols of the communicating devices (i.e., the infrastructure components that determine the
communication system do not affect the interfaces). Because interfaces are platform-independent, a client from any device using any operating system in any language can use the service.
Spamdexing
All attempts to deceive search engines or gain an unfair advantage in the search results of a search engine. Spamdexing decreases the value of a search engine's index by reducing the precision
with which the search engine can return relevant documents. Most search engines have measures in place to detect spamdexing and guilty pages are usually either penalized or de-listed.
Many webmasters inadvertently make themselves guilty by braking search engine submission rules.
Splash page
A page that is displayed before users enter a site. Splash pages are often comparatively empty except for a logo, welcome message and "click here to enter" type of link.
Splash pages are often used to house introductory Flash animations. Splash pages are generally considered annoying since they offer very little value. Even very impressive splash pages
offer only entertainment - which normally distracts from the sales effort and hampers SEO.
Splog
Short for spam blog, it's a slang term used to describe blogs that are established only to promote affiliate Web sites in order to help those sites achieve a better search engine page ranking.
Stealth
A collective name for techniques (like cloaking) that aim to deliver optimized content to spiders while delivering the "real" page to human visitors. Almost all search engines consider stealth a form of spamdexing.
Stemming
The use of linguistic analysis to get to the root form of a word. Search engines that use stemming compare the root forms of the search terms to the documents in its database. For example, if the user enters "viewer"
as the query, the search engine reduces the word to its root ("view") and returns all documents containing the root - like documents containing view, viewer, viewing, preview, review etc.
Stop character
Characters in URLs (like question marks, equal signs and ampersands) that signal the search engine spiders to stop crawling beyond a certain point.
Stop word
Words like conjunctions, prepositions etc. that are so commonly used that they have little or no influence on relevance. Most search engines ignore stop words entered in a query. Also see inverse document frequency.
Submission
The process of manually adding a URL to a search engine's list of URLs to spider - in effect telling a spider about a page in order to get it spidered and ultimately added to the search engine's database.
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