Glossary
The internal linking glossary.
The words SEO guides use as if everyone already knew them, defined in a sentence and then explained properly: what each one means on a real WordPress site, how to check it, and what to do about it. For the full method, start with the internal linking strategy guide, or browse every guide by topic.
0–9
- 301 redirect
- A server response that says a page has moved for good and sends visitors and crawlers to its new address. It is the standard way to retire or merge a page without losing its links.
A
- Anchor text
- The visible, clickable words of a link. Search engines and readers both use them to judge what the page on the other end is about before they get there.
B
- Breadcrumbs
- A short trail of links, usually above the title, showing where a page sits in the site: Home › Recipes › Bread › Sourdough. Each step links one level up.
- Broken link
- A link whose destination no longer loads — usually a 404 Not Found or 410 Gone, sometimes a server error. Readers hit a dead end and crawlers waste a visit.
C
- Canonical tag
- A tag in a page’s head that names the preferred address for its content when the same or very similar content is reachable at more than one URL. Google treats it as a strong signal, not an order.
- Click depth
- The smallest number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the home page by following links. The home page is at depth 0, anything it links to is at depth 1, and so on.
- Content silo
- A way of organising a site into separate topic sections whose pages link up and down within the section but rarely or never across to other sections.
- Contextual link
- A link written into the body of a page, inside a sentence about the thing it points to. The words around it give both readers and search engines context a menu link cannot.
- Crawl budget
- How many pages a search engine is able and willing to crawl on a site in a given time. Google says it mainly matters for very large or fast-changing sites — as a rough guide, a million or more pages, or ten thousand or more that change daily.
D
- Dead-end page
- A page with no links out to other pages on the same site, so a reader who finishes it has nowhere to go next except back or away.
E
- Exact-match anchor text
- Anchor text that repeats the target page's main search phrase word for word, such as “sourdough starter” linking to a guide that ranks for “sourdough starter”.
- External link
- A link from your site to a page on a different domain. Seen from the site it points at, the same link is a backlink.
G
- Google Search Console
- Google’s free service for site owners. It reports the searches a site appears for, its clicks and impressions, indexing problems and the links Google has found.
I
- Inbound internal links
- The links that point to a page from other pages on the same site. Counting them is the quickest way to see which pages a site treats as important — and which it has forgotten.
- Internal link
- A link from one page on a website to another page on the same website — the same domain, including its menus, footers and every link written into a post.
K
- Keyword cannibalization
- When two or more pages on the same site target the same search, so they compete with each other and neither ranks as well as one clear page would.
L
- Link equity
- Shorthand for the ranking value a link is thought to pass from one page to another. It is a way of talking about PageRank-style signals, not a number any search engine publishes.
N
- Navigational link
- A link that is part of the site’s template rather than its writing — menus, footers, sidebars, breadcrumbs and archive listings — and usually repeats on every page.
- Nofollow
- A link attribute, rel="nofollow", that asks search engines not to associate your site with the page you link to or pass ranking signals to it. Google treats it as a hint rather than a rule.
- Noindex
- A robots directive, in a meta tag or HTTP header, that tells search engines not to show a page in results. The page can still be crawled — a search engine has to fetch it to see the rule.
O
- Orphan page
- A published page that no other page on the same site links to. Search engines can still find it through a sitemap, but nothing on the site says it matters, and readers cannot reach it.
P
- PageRank
- Google’s original algorithm for judging a page’s importance by the links pointing to it, weighted by the importance of the pages they come from. Google still uses link-based signals, but the public PageRank score was retired years ago.
- Pillar page
- A broad page that covers a whole topic at overview level and links out to the narrower posts that go deep on each part of it — and is linked back to by them.
R
- Redirect chain
- Two or more redirects in a row between a link and the page it finally lands on: A redirects to B, which redirects to C. Each hop costs time, and Google’s crawlers follow at most ten hops.
S
- Search intent
- What the person typing a search actually wants — to learn something, to compare options, to buy, or to reach a particular site. Two queries with different words can share one intent, and the reverse.
- Site architecture
- How a site’s pages are organised and linked together: its sections, its menus, its hubs and the paths between them. It decides how deep each page sits and which pages look important.
- Soft 404
- A page that tells the visitor it does not exist — or has almost nothing on it — while the server still answers 200 OK. Google reports these separately because the server and the page disagree.
T
- Topic cluster
- A group of pages on one subject: a pillar page and the posts that each answer one part of it, linked to the pillar and to each other where it helps the reader.
- Topical authority
- The idea that a site which covers a subject thoroughly, with well-connected pages, is treated as a better source on it. A useful way to plan content, though not a single score any search engine publishes.
W
- Web crawler
- A program that discovers pages by fetching them and following the links it finds. Search engines use crawlers to build their index; audit tools use them to map a site.
X
- XML sitemap
- A file that lists the addresses on a site you want search engines to know about. WordPress has generated one at /wp-sitemap.xml since version 5.5; SEO plugins usually replace it with their own.
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