The Marketing Dictionary
SEO and digital marketing glossaryWhat is Robots.txt?
A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can or cannot access on a website. It’s mainly used to prevent search engines from wasting crawl budgets on unimportant pages. The robots.txt file doesn’t, however, prevent webpages from being indexed by search engines.
What is Rel=canonical?
A rel=canonical element, (also known as a canonical link or canonical tag), is a piece of HTML code which helps to prevent duplicate content issues.
rel=canonical is used in a piece of code which looks like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="www.example.com" />
This element can be placed in all versions of a webpage to tell search engines which version of a URL is the correct one to be included in the index.
What is RankBrain?
RankBrain is the name given to the machine learning-based algorithm which has been used by Google since 2015. RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to process search queries and provide relevant search results for users. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine makes a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filters the results accordingly. This makes it effective at handling unique search queries.
What are Render-Blocking Scripts?
If a script is render blocking, it means that it’s keeping a webpage from loading as quickly as it could. It’s recommended to remove or defer scripts which interfere with the loading of any content that sits above the fold. Removing or deferring render-blocking scripts improves page load speed which makes for a better user experience.
What is a Relative Link?
A link can be absolute or relative. An absolute link shows the full URL of the page being linked, whereas a relative link only shows the part after the domain.
Example of an absolute link:
http://example.com/folder/filename.html
Example of a relative link:
../folder/filename.html
Whilst both versions of the link will work, due to potential issues with canonicalisation, it’s generally best to use absolute links rather than relative links where possible.
What is Reinclusion?
Reinclusion (also known as reconsideration) refers to the process of asking a search engine to re-index a website that was dropped from the index due to a penalty.
What are Rich Snippets?
Rich snippets, (also known as rich results) are normal Google search results with additional data displayed. A normal search result shows a title, a description and a URL. A rich snippet, however, may have other features such as review stars, product prices, event dates, images or videos. The extra data usually comes from structured data in the page’s HTML.
What is Rendering?
Rendering generally means loading.
A webpage has two states:
- initial HTML
- rendered HTML
Rendering is what happens in between the two states.
The initial HTML contains only HTML and links to resources such as JavaScript, CSS and images that are needed to build the page. You can see the initial HTML when you right click on any webpage and select ‘View Source’.
The rendered HTML is also known as the DOM (Document Object Model). This is the initial HTML plus any changes made by the JavaScript files. You can see the DOM when you open your browser’s Developer Tools and click the Console tab.
What is a Responsive Website?
A responsive website is a website design that is easily adaptable to the user's screen size regardless of the device.
What is a Rich Snippet?
Rich snippets are results shown in search engines with additional data. They stand out more than standard results and have a higher click-through rate.
