SEO Fundamentals Glossary

Anchor Text

The clickable, visible text of a hyperlink — the words a user sees and clicks to follow a link, which signals to search engines what the destination page is about.

Backlink

A hyperlink from one website pointing to a page on another website, used by search engines as a signal of authority and trust.

Domain Authority

A third-party score (0–100) developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine results pages based on its backlink profile.

Duplicate Content

Substantively identical or very similar content that appears on multiple URLs, either within the same site or across different sites, which can confuse search engines about which version to index and rank.

Keyword Stuffing

The practice of overloading a web page with keywords or keyword phrases in an attempt to manipulate search rankings — a technique Google explicitly classifies as spam.

Nofollow

A link attribute (rel='nofollow') that instructs search engines not to follow a link or pass link equity (PageRank) to the destination URL.

Organic Traffic

Website visitors who arrive through unpaid search engine results, as opposed to paid ads, social media, direct visits, or referral links.

Page Authority

A proprietary score developed by Moz (0–100) that predicts how well a specific page will rank in search engine results, based primarily on its backlink profile.

PageRank

Google's original algorithm that assigns a numerical importance score to web pages based on the quantity and quality of links pointing to them, treating each link as a 'vote' of confidence.

SERP

The page Google or another search engine displays in response to a user's query, containing organic results, paid ads, and rich features like featured snippets, image packs, and knowledge panels.

Thin Content

Web pages that offer little or no value to users — characterized by very low word count, auto-generated text, scraped content, or pages that are essentially duplicates of other pages with minimal original substance.