Glossary of terms

A Manual Action is a penalty which Google places on your website if your content does not follow the quality guidelines. A Manual Action can make the pages of your site rank lower on Gogle or be completely omitted from SERPs. 

For a Manual Action to be placed on your website, a human reviewer will make a judgement on the integrity of the content on your site based on many different factors. From a content perspective, the main issues for which a Manual Action will have been taken on your site are: 'pure spam', 'thin content' or 'structured data issues'.

'Pure spam' is when a website has resorted to underhand tactics to manipluate the Google quality guidelines, this is sometimes called 'Black Hat SEO'.

'Thin content' is pretty self explanatory. Thin content is when the content on a site has little-to-no value and negatively impacts the user experience (UX). 

'Structured data issues' are issues that arise when the content on a website does not marry up with the structred data markup of the website. For example, this could be marking up irrelevant or misleading content. 

If a Manual Action is placed on a website, the owner will be alerted via their Google Search console access and via email communications. Impacted users will need to take steps to solve the issues raised by the Manual Action and request a review to have the penalties on the website lifted. 

A Manual Penalty is the specific penalty relating to a piece of content which violates Google's quality and communtiy guidelines when a Manual Action is enforced on a website. A manual penalty issued by a human reviewer rather than an automation. There are many types of manual penalties including, but not limited to, dangerous content, harrassing content, misleading content and hateful content. 
 

A meta desciption is a brief summary of a webpage which is displayed in SERPs.

The meta description should be within 100-160 characters long and include the focus keyword of your webpage. For example, if you had a product page for 'electric scooters', it would not be useful for your meta decription to state that this page displayed apples. 

A meta keyword was a HTML element which was used to describe the contents of a webpage. This practice is now unsupported by most search engines and largely outdated. Meta keywords were supposed to function in a similar manner to modern meta descriptions. 

For example, on a product page displaying 'electric scooters' you would put in the meta tag <meta name= "keywords" content="electric scooter">
The practice of using meta keywords was dropped by most because it became a target for keyword stuffing and other Black-Hat SEO practices. 

A meta redirect, also known as a HTML redirect, is a way to use the meta refresh tag to redirect a user to a different webpage, without the use of a 301 redirect. A meta redirect commands the web browser to change the page, where a 301 redirect commands the server.

There are a few reasons why 301 redirects are preferable to a meta redirect. Firstly, Google prefers 301s. Secondly, a meta redirect will not transfer the rankings from one page to another like a 301 will. Thirdly, a meta redirect is not considered best practice for a website as it can create a confusing user experience (UX). Meta redirects are often used my spammers as it takes longer for Search engines to pick up on them. 

A meta tag is an umbrella term for the meta data regarding a webpage. 'Meta', in the most simple terms, means how something defines itself. If a book is self-referential, for example, we might term it as meta. Meta tags function in the same way, they are the means in which a website defines itself to a crawler. There are many types of meta tags including: titles, descriptions, robot tags, keywords and so on.

Meta tags tell search engines key information regarding your webpage. Search engines scan the HTML of a webpage for meta tags to discern what a webpage is about. Using meta tags within the HTML of a webpage, you can define what search engine crawlers set the title of the page as, the summary of the page, the key ideas on the page and even command it to index the page or not. 

A meta title is the meta tag which refers to the title of a webpage. Meta titles should be between 59-70 characters in length and include the focus keyword of the webpage. Meta tiles are the linked titles which come up on SERPs. 

You'll see that this page, for example, has the lovely meta title:

Meta Title Definition - Viaduct Generation

This tells the user and search engine bots all of the information needed to discern what the webpage is about. 

Mobile-first indexing is how Google preferentially indexes mobile-friendly versions of webpages in SERPs.

Think of mobile-first indexing like a pineapple upside-down cake: Google brings the good stuff to the top. Because most users start their searches on a mobile device, Google tends to use the mobile-friendly version of a webpage to rank and index a page. Historically, Google would use desktop versions of webpages, but this shifted in 2018 when it became clear that mobile search outweighed desktop.