SEO Glossary – G

Gateway Page
Gateway page is also known as a doorway page or jump page, a gateway page is a URL with minimal content designed to rank highly for a specific keyword and redirect visitors to a homepage or designated Landing Page. Some search engines frown on gateway pages as a softer form of Cloaking or Spam. However, gateway pages may be legitimate landing pages designed to measure the success of a promotional campaign, and they are commonly allowed in Paid Listings.

Geographical Targeting
Geographical targeting is the focusing of Search Engine Marketing on states, counties, cities and neighborhoods that are important to a company’s business. One basic aspect of geographical targeting is adding the names of relevant cities or streets to a site’s keywords, i.e. Hyde Street Chicago apartments. Another important element of geo-targeting is increasing your site’s presence on Local Search engines.

Geographic Segmentation
Geographic segmentation is the use of Analytics to categorize a site’s web traffic by the physical locations from which it originated.

Google AdSense
Google AdSense is an ad-serving program operated by Google that provides relevant text, image, and video-based advertisements to enrolled site owners. Advertisers register via Google AdWords and pay for ads on a Pay-Per-Click, Cost-Per-Thousand or Cost-Per-Action basis. This revenue is shared with Google AdSense host sites, typically on a PPC basis (which sometimes leads to Click Fraud). Google uses its search Algorithms and Contextual Link Inventory to display the most appropriate ads based on site content, Query relevancy, ad “quality scores,” and other factors.

Google AdWords
Google AdWords is the Keyword Submission program that determines the advertising rates and keywords used in the Google AdSense program. Advertisers bid on the keywords that are relevant to their businesses. Ranked ads then appear as sponsored links on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) and Google AdSense host sites.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offering detailed visitor statistics. The tool can be used to track all the usual site activities: visits, page views, pages per visit, bounce rates and average time on site etc.

Google Bombing
Google Bombing is when a group of sites such as blogs join forces to link to an unflattering page about a company such that this page rises to the top of the search results in Google. Google bombing takes advantage of the power of hyperlink text and of PageRank. For example, if a group of sites with high PageRank all link to a page about XYZ Company’s inappropriate behavior with hyperlink text of “XYZ Company sucks” then the linked page can shoot to the top of Google’s search results for the term “XYZ Company.”

Google Bowling
Google Bowling is a black hat SEO technique used to knock competitors down or out of search engine results. It is a form of SEO sabotage that is conducted by pointing hundreds of questionable links from low quality sites at a competitor’s site so they end up banned or penalized by Google. Generally newer sites are more susceptible to Google Bowling as older sites are better established with a range of existing high quality links.

Google Dance
Google Dance refers to when Google indexes are updated. This period of time often results in fluctuations in the index size and some noticeable changes in search engine result positions. The term Google Dance was adopted as while an update is being processed the position of a website in Google seems to “dance” as it fluctuates. The fluctuation is due to each of Google’s nine datacenters being updated out of sync – meaning for a time the results are different.

Google Juice
Google Juice is an Internet slang to refer to the substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks. Pages with lots of links pointing to them acquire much ‘Google Juice’ and pages which link to highly ‘juicy’ pages acquire some reflected ‘Google Juice’.

Google Traffic Estimator
Google Traffic Estimator is a tool that indicates the number of clicks to expect on Google Adwords ads for particular keywords. The tool can be used to indicate search volume, average cost per click, estimated ad positions, estimated clicks per day and estimated cost per day. Google Traffic Estimator does not provide a numeric estimate of the number of search queries, instead it offers only a visual estimation of search volume in a small graphic.

Google Trends
Google Trends is a tool which allows you to see how Google search volumes for a particular keyword have changed over a period of time. It shows the popularity of search terms from the beginning of 2004 onwards.

Google XML Sitemap

Google Sitemaps are XML files that list the URLs available on a site. The aim is to help site owners notify search engines about the URLs on a website that are available for indexing. Webmasters can include information about each URL, such as when it was last updated and its importance in the context of the site.

Googlebot
Googlebot is a search bot used by Google. It collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine. If a webmaster wishes to restrict the information on their site available to a Googlebot, or other well-behaved spider, they can do so by with the appropriate directives in a robots.txt file.

Graphical Search Inventory (GSI)

Graphical Search Inventory is the visual equivalent of Contextual Link Inventory. GSI is non-text-based advertising such as Banner Ads, pop-up ads, browser toolbars, animation, sound, video and other media that is synchronized to relevant Keyword queries.

Gray Hat SEO
Gray hat SEO refers to Search Engine Optimization strategies that fall in between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO. Gray hat SEO techniques can be legitimate in some cases and illegitimate in others. Such techniques include Doorway Pages, Gateway Pages, Cloaking and duplicate content.

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