| Meta Search Engine |
A server which passes queries on to many search engines and/or directories and then summarises all the results. Ask Jeeves, Dogpile, Infind, Metacrawler, Metafind and Metasearch are examples of meta search engines. |
| Meta tag |
A construct placed in the HTML header of a web page, providing information which is not visible to browsers. The most common meta tags (and those most relevant to search engines) are KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION.
The KEYWORDS tag allows the author to emphasise the importance of certain words and phrases used within the page. Some search engines will respond to this information - others will ignore it. Don't use quotes around the keywords or keyphrases.
The DESCRIPTION tag allows the author to control the text of the summary displayed when the page appears in the results of a search. Again, some search engines will ignore this information.
The HTTP-EQUIV meta tag is used to issue HTTP commands, and is frequently used with the REFRESH tag to refresh page content after a given number of seconds. Gateway pages sometimes use this technique to force browsers to a different page or site. Most search engines are wise to this, and will index the final page and/or reduce the ranking. Infoseek has a strong policy against this technique, and they might penalize your site, or even ban it.
Other common meta tags are GENERATOR (usually advertising the software used to generate the page) and AUTHOR (used to credit the author of the page, and often containing e-mail address, homepage URL and other information). |
| Mining Company |
A large directory spread over many different URLs The main URL is http://www.miningco.com. |
| Mirror Sites |
Multiple copies of web sites or web pages, often on different servers. The process of registering these multiple copies with search engines is often treated as spamdexing, because it artificially increases the relevancy of the pages. Filters such as the Infoseek Sniffer now remove multiple mirrors from the indexes. |
| Misspellings |
People quite often spell words incorrectly when using search engines. Pages which use common misspellings will quite often receive extra hits, so it is a useful technique to include common misspellings of words in alt tags, keywords, page names and titles. A similar effect occurs when spaces are missed out and words are accidentally joined together.
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| MultiCrawl |
A parallel search engine which offers users their own branded versions. http://www.multicrawl.com. |
| Multiple Domain Names |
The use of several extra domains to provide gateway pages or gateway sites to the main site. |
| Multiple Keyword Tags |
The use of more than one Keywords META tag in order to try to increase the relevancy of the best keywords on a page. This is not recommended. It may be detected as a spamming technique, or all but one of the tags may simply be ignored. |
| Multiple Titles |
The practice of repeating a title tag within the HTML coding of a website to improve search engine positioning. This trick can get you banned from a search engine. |
| MPEG |
A files used to compress and transmit movies and videos online. |
