Search Engine Optimisation Glossary
Doorway Page
Also called a gateway page. A doorway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimised to target one specific keyphrase. Doorway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using doorway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
FFA
Abbreviation for Free For All. FFA sites post large lists of unrelated links to anyone and everyone. FFA sites and the links they provide are basically useless. Humans do not use them and search engines minimise their importance in ranking formulas.
Gateway Page
Also called a doorway page. A gateway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimised to target one specific keyphrase. Gateway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using gateway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.
Google Dance
While the Google update is in progress, search results for each of Google’s nine datacenters are different. The positions of a site appears to “dance” as it fluctuates minute to minute. “Google dance” is an unofficial term coined to refer to the period when Google is performing the update to its index. Google may be changing their index calculation method to allow for a continuous update (which will effectively end the roughly monthly dances).
IBL
Abbreviation for In Bound Link. Any link on another page that points to the subject page. Also called a back link.
Keyword/Keyphrase
Keywords are words which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are multi-word phrases used in search engine queries. SEO is the process of optimising web pages for keywords and keyphrases so that they rank highly in the results returned for search queries.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the ‘benefit’ of search engines and not human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to human visitors. While not necessarily a violation of search engine Terms of Service, at least when the words are visible to humans, it detracts from the impact of a page (it looks like spam). It is also possible that search engines may discount the importance of large blocks of text that do not conform to grammatical structures (ie. lists of disconnected keywords). There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.
