Internet Marketing \ SEO Terms

Link campaigns are a form of online marketing and is also a method for search engine optimization. A business seeking to increase the number of visitors to its web site can ask its strategic partners, professional organizations, chambers of commerce, suppliers, and customers to add links from their web sites. Typically a link campaign involves mutual links back and forth between related sites.

Increasing the number of links to a site has two beneficial effects:

• Search engines such as Google judge the importance of a site by the number of other sites that link to it.

• The additional links result in visitors moving from the linking site to the target site.

When conducting a link campaign, the essentials steps are to identify potential link partners, request the links, and specify the link text. The value of a link depends on the traffic and reputation of the linking site, and the relevancy of its content to the target site's content. Off topic links are generally not useful because they tend to upset visitors, and search engines may view them as link spam.

Link farms are web sites set up solely for the purpose of exchanging links. These sites are viewed dimly by search engines, and Google specifically advises webmasters not to participate in link farms:

"Linking schemes will often do a site more harm than good."
 

A server farm is a collection of computer servers usually maintained by an enterprise to accomplish server needs far beyond the capability of one machine. Often, server farms will have both a primary and a backup server allocated to a single task, so that in the event of the failure of the primary server, a backup server will take over the primary server's function.

Server farms are typically co-located with the network switches and/or routers which enable communication between the different parts of the cluster and the users of the cluster.

Server farms are commonly used for cluster computing. Many modern supercomputers consist of giant server farms of high-speed processors connected by either Gigabit Ethernet or custom interconnects such as Myrinet.

Another common use of server farms is for web hosting.

Server farms are increasingly being used instead of or in addition to mainframe computers by large enterprises, although server farms do not as yet reach the same reliability levels as mainframes. Because of the sheer number of computers in large server farms, the failure of individual machines is a commonplace event, and the management of large server farms needs to take this into account, by providing support for redundancy, automatic failover, and rapid reconfiguration of the server cluster.

The performance of the very largest server farms (thousands of processors and up) is typically limited by the performance of the data center's cooling systems rather than by the performance of the processors. For this reason, the critical design parameter for such systems tends to be performance per watt of generated heat, rather than performance per processor.
 

A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites in order to ensure mutual traffic.

If Romeo's website links to Julia's website AND Julia's website links to Romeo's website, the websites are reciprocally linked.

Website owners often submit their sites to reciprocal link exchange directories in order to achieve higher rankings in the search engines.
 

Spamdexing or search engine spamming is the practice of deliberately and dishonestly manipulating search engines to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned in a dishonest manner. Many designers of web pages try to get a good ranking in search engines and design their pages accordingly. Spamdexing refers exclusively to practices that are dishonest and mislead search and indexing programs to give a page a ranking it does not deserve.

People who do this are called search engine spammers. The word is a portmanteau of spamming and indexing (as well as a pun on spandex.)

Search engines use a variety of algorithms to determine relevancy ranking. Some of these include determining whether the search term appears in the META keywords tag, others whether the search term appears in the body text of a web page. A variety of techniques are used to spamdex, including listing chosen keywords on a page in small-point font face the same colour as the page background (rendering it invisible to humans but not search engine web crawlers).

Search engine spammers are generally aware that the content that they promote is not very useful or relevant to the ordinary internet surfer. They try to use methods that will make the website appear above more relevant websites in the search engine listings. The rise of spamdexing in the mid-1990s made the leading search engines of the time less useful, and the success of Google at both producing better search results and combating keyword spamming, through its reputation-based PageRank link analysis system, led directly to its becoming the dominant search site late in the decade, where it remains. However, while it has not been rendered useless by spamdexing, Google has not been immune to more sophisticated methods either. Spamdexing on Google has generated the term Google bombing.
 

Doorway pages are web pages that are created to rank high in search engine results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. They are also known as landing pages, bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and by other names.

If you click through to a typical doorway page from a search engine result page, in most cases you will be redirected with a fast META refresh command to another page. Doorway pages are easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. Sometimes a doorway page is copied from another high ranking page, but this is likely to cause the search engine to detect the page as a duplicate and exclude it from the search engine listings.

Because many search engines give you a penalty for using the META refresh command, some doorway pages just trick you into clicking on a link to get you to the desired destination page.

The new era of Doorway pages is come with the RSS Feeds technology. A new software named TrafficBoosterPro is fetching RSS Feeds from the Internet that are optimized on your keywords and produces thousands of doorway pages that are using keyword staffing and Cloacking technicque to show the engines new fresh content at every visit because RSS Feeds are updated almost every 15 minutes and it's also fetching the RSS Feeds of 3 or more sites at the same time randomly to confuse the engines not to find the same content to other sites and ban the doorway pages domain. When a visitor arrives at any of these pages it redirected by javascript method that search engines can't trace and sent the visitor to the desired site.
 

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users' browser; this is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of whatever is requesting the page. The only legitimate uses for cloaking used to be for delivering content to users that search engines couldn't parse, like Macromedia Flash. However, cloaking is often used to try to trick search engines into giving the relevant site a higher ranking; it can also be used to trick search engine users into visiting a site based on the search engine description which site turns out to have substantially different - or even pornographic - content. For this reason some search engines threaten to ban sites using cloaking.

Cloaking is a form of doorway pages technique.

A similar technique is also used on the Open Directory Project web directory. It differs in several ways from search engine cloaking:

• It is intended to fool human editors, rather than computer search engine spiders.

• The decision to cloak or not is based upon the HTTP referrer, which tells the URL of the page on which a user clicked a link to get to the page. Some cloakers will give the fake page to anyone who comes from a web directory website, since directory editors will usually examine sites by clicking on links that appear on a directory webpage. Other cloakers give the fake page to everyone except those coming from a major search engine; this makes it harder to detect cloaking, while not costing them many visitors, since most people find websites by using a search engine.

In more recent times several well known and well respected sites have taken up cloaking to deliver personalised content to their regular customers. In fact, many of the top 1000 sites - including household names like Amazon.com - actively cloak. None of these have been banned from search engines purely because of cloaking.
 

Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical Search engine optimization (SEO) technique. Keyword stuffing is when a web page is loaded up with keywords in the Meta tags or on the Web page's content. The common techniques today for keyword stuffing are repeating the same word over and over again in the Meta tags, which is why many search engines don't look at the Meta tags any more, and also on the page with text that is the same color as the background, also known as invisible or hidden text.

The reason keyword stuffing is used is to obtain maximum search engine ranking and visibility for particular phrases with the purpose of getting visitors from the search engine (such as Google, Yahoo!, etc.) to come to their web page. However, if the word is repeated too much it will raise a red flag to the search engines and they will likely place a spam filter on the Web site or Web page.
 

A web portal is a web site that provides a starting point or gateway to other resources on the Internet or an intranet. Intranet portals are also known as enterprise information portals (EIP). The building blocks of portals are portlets, which contain portions of content published using markup languages such as HTML and XML.

Portals typically provide personalized capabilities to their users. They are designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware, and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones.