| About.com | Formerly known as The Mining Company, About is a guide based information portal. |
| Above the fold | With reference to the top part of a newspaper, the term is used in internet marketing to describe the top part of the page that the user can see without scrolling down. |
| Ad Clicks | Number of times users click on an ad banner. |
| Address | A unique identifier for a computer or site online, usually a URL for a web site or marked with an @ for an email address. Literally, it is how your computer finds a location on the information highway. |
| Ad Views (Impressions) | Number of times an ad banner is downloaded and presumably seen by visitors. If the same ad appears on multiple pages simultaneously, this statistic may understate the number of ad impressions, due to browser caching. Corresponds to net impressions in traditional media. There is currently no way of knowing if an ad was actually loaded. Most servers record an ad as served even if it was not. |
| Algorithm | The process a search engine applies to web pages so it can accurately produce a list of results based on a search term. Search engines regularly change their algorithms to improve the quality of the search results. Hence search engine optimization tends to require constant research and monitoring. |
| Adjacency | A property of the relationship between words in a search engine (or directory) query. Search engines often allow users to specify that words should be next to one another or somewhere near one another in the web pages searched. |
| Agent Name Delivery | The process of sending search engine spiders to a tailored page, yet directing your visitors to what you want them to see. This is done using server side includes (or other dynamic content techniques). SSI, for example, can be used to deliver different content to the client depending on the value of HTTP_USER_AGENT. Most normal browser software packages have a user agent string which starts with "Mozilla" (coined from Mosaic and Godzilla). Most search engine spiders have specific agent names, such as "Gulliver", "Infoseek sidewinder", "Lycos spider" and "Scooter".
By switching on the value of HTTP_USER_AGENT (a process known as agent detection), different pages can be presented at the same URL, so that normal visitors will never see the page submitted to search engines (and vice versa).
In practice this is somewhat simplistic. Some search engines pretend to be "plain mozilla" browsers to prevent use of agent name delivery. Effective use of agent name delivery can be very difficult, and may not even work. How do you spot agent name delivery at work? This is quite difficult, as the owners of web pages using agent name delivery can control what you see! You may be able to guess that a page is using this technique if it appears to be indexed incorrectly or the title or description don't match the page you see, but this could also have been achieved by switching pages after the relevant search engine has indexed it. If you really want to see the search engines' tailored version of a page, write a program (e.g. a Perl script) to retrieve the URL with HTTP_USER_AGENT set to each of the strings used by the search engine spiders. If agent name delivery is in use, one or more of the retrieved pages will be different to the others! |
Altavista |
A popular search engine with the largest database on the web, indexing more than 140 million pages. Its main URL is http://www.altavista.com. Until 1998, this search engine provided the search facility for Yahoo. Altavista indexes all the words in a web page, and new pages are normally added to the database fairly quickly, within a couple of working days. You are asked to submit just the main page of your site. The Altavista spider will then explore your site and index a representative sample of the pages |
| AOL Netfind | The default search engine for users of the AOL internet service provider, and hence a busy site. Its URL is http://www.netfind.com. It is essentially the same engine as Excite.
American Online. Stands for "A(merica) O(n)L(ine)" America Online, Inc., based in Virginia, originally began as a closed network content provider; meaning only AOL subscribers had access to AOL content. Today, this popular service provider continues to offer their own content (available only to AOL subscribers) as well as e-mail and Internet access that can be parentally controlled. |
| Applet | A small program, often written in Java, which usually runs in a web browser, as part of a web page. It is possible that the use of such a program may cause spiders and robots to stop indexing a page. |
| ArchitextSpider | The name of the Excite search engine's spider. |
| Ask Jeeves | A meta search engine which can be asked questions in English. This service is also in use at Altavista. http://www.askjeeves.com A meta search engine that allows natural english quires. You can ask a question as your search. Online: http://www.ask.com . |
| Anchor | A word, phrase or graphic image, in hypertext, it is the object that is highlighted, underlined or "clickable" which links to another site. |
| Anchor Text | Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. For example: < a href="http://www.seo-help.com/" >This is the anchor text< /a > |
| API |
Application Programming Interface |
A set of rules that a search engine uses to rank the listings contained within its index, in response to a particular query. No search engine reveals exactly how its own algorithm works, to protect itself from competitors and those who wish to spam the search engine. Source: Did-It.com |
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