Glossary of terms

The DA, also known as domain authority, is a value from 1 to 100 that measures a website’s weight or authority depending on its organic position on the SERPs. In other words, it is a metric that serves as a way to decide a domain’s supremacy over a different one, or even its respective ones.

When it comes to SEO, controlling your DA status regarding your website serves to check if the SEO strategies you are currently performing are working properly. It will also allow you to realise about your competitors or other websites’ DA, in order to analyse their strategies.

De-indexing refers to when your website is temporarily or permanently taken out from search engine rankings. In other words, if your site has been de-indexed, it means that your site will neve appear on SERPs while that state is applied to your site.

The main reasons a website might be suffering a de-indexing status are:

• Duplicated content
• Outdated content
• Gated content
• Pages with little and poor content, or no content at all

De-indexing can also be applied by search engines due to wrongful practices (Black-Hat SEO), or voluntarily by a site webmaster.

A defective link is a link that has no object or does not lead to anything. Therefore a website’s rankings on search engines will be drastically affected, making the website with defective links appear in a lower position on the SERPs.

Directory links refer to those links born in a web directory, which acts as a list or catalogue of different websites. The former purpose of directory links is to list people or  businesses’ online entries, such as their homepage address or their contact information.

Although web or link directories are not used as they used to be, these directories have managed to survive and, somehow, amplify their range of uses, such as covering entire websites or even allowing searches within their database.

When it comes to SEO, submitting your website to a link directory will for sure help you strategy, as you would be  getting backlinks in the form of directory links to the site. It may be considered as a link building tool.

A DNS, also known as Domain Name System, is technology based on a database used to resolve names on networks. In other words, DNS technology allows us to know the machine’s IP address where the domain we want to access is hosted.

When it comes to this kind of technology we need to be aware of the three components needed for  a DNS system to work properly:

• DNS client: runs on the user’s computer and makes requests to the DNS server to resolve names.
• DNS server: resolves the request from the DNS client and sends the response.
• Authority zones: disseminate information about domain names and subdomains.

Dofollow links are the conventional links that allow both users and search bots to follow them and to convey authority to the destination URL. In other words, if your  webmaster is using a link to a site with dofollow links, either the bots on the search engine and the other users will be able to follow it.

When it comes to SEO, dofollow links will be of relevant significance for your SEO strategy and so as to achieve a better Page Rank.

Think is like this as a Google example:

The dofollow link will tell the GoogleBot that that backling is allowed to be tracked. So the dofollow will be interpreted by that bot as a sign of trust from the linked website to the destination page. As a result,  this will be read as  a trust signal and will have a positive effect on the rankings of the linked landing page.

The Document Object Model (DO) is an HTML and XML programming interface used to interpret HTML and XML files. The DOM gives a representation of a document as a group of nodes and structured objects that have properties and methods.

It basically connects web pages to programming languages or scripts, such as JavaScript.

As an object model, the DOM serves to identify:

• The interface and object used to represent and manipulate  a document.
• The semantics of these interfaces and objects, including both behaviour and attributes.
• The relationship and collaborations among these interfaces and objects.

DOM is highly related to SEO strategies as the rendering times of a website directly affect the positioning of that site, so learning how the structure of the DOM influences a site is essential. Some factors to be taken into consideration would be:

• Shrinking and applying DOM elements in the correct form.
• Proper use of JavaScript.
• Minifying HTML, CSS and JavaScript content.
• Using Content Delivery Networks (CDM).
   

The Domain Name Register is the action of reserving a name on the Internet for a certain period of time, usually one year. Domain registration is necessary for a web page, an email account or any other web service to give you personality and a  recognised identity. However, it is not always necessary to register a new domain.

When it comes to SEO,  the length of that domain name registration is worth taking it seriously, as webmasters have often  said that search engines  give more preference to  long time registered domains. This is because the domains usually registered for less than a year or a year, are domain bought for spamming webs. So think consciously about your domain's name registration and how it will affect your SEO strategy and, as a result, your revenue and traffic.

Domain popularity measures how many different domains have created one or more links towards a specific website. In order to get that indicator we ought to analyse the number of domains that have provided inbound links to the main site.

We might sometimes realise that the same domain created thousands of links from the initial site. That might happen either because of a voluntary strategy performance, or due to technical problems. Here lies the importance of evaluating domain popularity, which will allow us to overcome such inconveniences by giving us a clear view of how far a  site’s backlink profile really extends.

The domain rating is a metric that helps you to measure the authority of a domain after analysing the generated impact of the link building strategy. In other words, DR tells us the strength of a link directed to a specific website.

The truth is that DR is not actually an official Google indicator, which means that it may be understood in different forms depending on the different SEO service platforms. This indicator is presented as a numeric value that goes from 0 to 100, being 100 the higher result that we can get.

Some of the main advices given to improve a domains rating, and as a result a domain authority might be:

• Generate high quality links
• Use natural and friendly anchor texts and keywords

As the name itself shows, domain trust is basically the trust in a domain or the level of trust a domain demonstrates. Domain trust can be explained as the interaction of many factors that can demonstrate a website’s respectability and credibility.

The main goal of the domain trust is to ensure the improvement of a web page position on the SERPs. The right use of domain trust will positively act as a website’s positioning factor, so it must be considered an important asset in an SEO strategy.

Be careful not to use black-hat techniques to improve your domain trust, because it will eventually be detected by search engines and webmasters and it will result in really bad consequences. 

Doorway pages are those pages prepared with specific content to be positioned by certain dictionaries in search engines, with the exception that when users enter them, they are redirected to another page with the doorway page creator’s content of interest.

These pages are often filled with keywords that when placed in those pages help to channel the traffic to the main website. Although it may seem similar to what landing pages are for, there’s nothing in common between them. While doorway pages are generally considered as outdated spam tactics that try to fool the users and redirect them to the content we want them instead to what they thought they were being directed to; landing pages are pages within a website, developed for the unique purpose of converting visitors into leads or as sales prospects through a particular offer.

Duplicate content refers to that content that is similar or exact to other website’s content or placed on different pages on the same website. It is basically word-for-word content from another page.

When it comes to SEO, duplicate content is not considered to be a great strategy, although it’s still often used by many websites in order to manipulate search engines so as a way to achieve a higher ranking on the SERPs and, as a result, get more traffic.

What search engines basically look for when their crawlers read web pages and sites is to offer the user an optimal search result, so it will never be positive if search engines are always finding the same content in different places on the Internet. Therefore, search engines will check every duplicate content, evaluate it and decide which duplicate content is worse.

A good strategy to reduce or to get rid of duplicate content is to try and expand the content, like rewording, rephrasing it, or even merging it onto a single page.

Dwell time is a metric (KPI) that measures the time starting when users enter a website by clicking on one of the search results, until they return to the initial results page again.
This metric is not really considered to be a positioning factor, but an algorithm Google uses as a quality value, in order to tell whether a result reaches the user’s search intention. Therefore, as a result, that would eventually be helping that website's positioning on SERPs.

Some recommendations to improve dwell times value might be:

• Generate high quality content
• Improve loading speed
• Improve the user experience, or at least pay attention to it
• Offer interesting and entertaining content

A dynamic URL is a page address generated from a database obtained and analysed by the server. It is known to be the result of using a URL parameter with a static URL. It is often used in forums, product lists, sessions and interactive websites. The most used programs to create this type of dynamic websites are JavaScript, PHP, Java EE or Microsoft's NET platform.

When it comes to SEO, because as search engines spiders a dynamic URL, this site will be seen as a huge sequence of web pages with a constant content changing. This is known as spider trap. Therefore, if what we want to do is to ensure a better website indexation, it may be better to simply use a static URL, in which its content does not change unless the HTML code is rewritten.