$ cat Glossary
Definitions of search and AI-manipulation terminology, with current scope and links to deeper chapters.
1,877 words~9 min read1 technique cardsREFERENCE
A─Z ▸ define ▸ scope ▸ link to chapter
search & AI-manipulation terminology, at current scope
GLOSSARY
Core terms used across the archive, in plain language. Press / to search for any term. Where a term has a full chapter, it is linked.
Core concepts
Black hat SEORanking manipulation that violates a platform's guidelines.
Grey hatTactics in the ambiguous zone between clearly-allowed and clearly-prohibited.
SERPSearch engine results page.
CloakingPresenting different content to crawlers and people with the intent to manipulate rankings and mislead users. Equivalent dynamic rendering is not automatically cloaking.
Doorway pageA page built only to funnel search traffic to another destination.
Anchor textThe clickable words of a link; historically a strong, now-noisier, signal.
Dofollow / nofollow“Dofollow” is an informal name for an ordinary link. Google treats nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints; no link is guaranteed ranking credit.
Manual actionA human-reviewer penalty applied to a site in Search Console.
DisavowRequesting that specified inbound links be disregarded. Google recommends it only in defined circumstances involving considerable artificial links and actual or likely manual action.
Links & authority
PBNPrivate Blog Network: sites one owner controls to pass links to a money site.
Money siteThe site an operator actually wants to rank and monetise.
Link schemeAny arrangement to create links primarily to manipulate rankings.
FootprintAn observable shared attribute such as hosting or a template; useful for investigation but insufficient alone to establish coordinated abuse.
Expired / drop-catch domainA domain registered again after lapse or deletion. Its buyer’s intent and any surviving ranking credit are separate questions.
DA / DRDomain Authority / Domain Rating: third-party (Moz/Ahrefs) scores, not Google signals.
siteAuthorityA site-level score named in the 2024 leak; weight unknown.
PageRankGoogle's founding link-value algorithm; several variants appear in the leak.
Engagement & AI
NavBoostA Google ranking system using click information, discussed in public 2023 antitrust testimony as well as later leaked documentation.
Good / bad clicksField labels reported in leaked documentation. Their names do not establish exact production definitions, thresholds or present weighting.
CTR manipulationFaking clicks/engagement to influence rankings.
GEOGenerative Engine Optimization: optimising to be cited by AI answers.
AI OverviewsGoogle's AI-generated answer box atop many results.
AI poisoningManipulating what AI engines cite or say via seeded/false content.
Prompt injectionUntrusted instructions that attempt to redirect a model or agent. Indirect injections arrive through retrieved material and can be visible text as well as hidden markup.
Policy & enforcement
Site reputation abuseThird-party publishing arrangements covered by Google’s host-reputation policy; assess current editorial-integration criteria and regional treatment.
Scaled content abuseMass-producing pages primarily to rank, not to help users.
Expired domain abuseRepurposing an expired domain's authority for low-value content.
SpamBrainGoogle's AI-based spam-detection system.
Helpful ContentHelpful-content signals within core ranking since March 2024; a standalone historical system preceded that integration.
SEO poisoningManipulating search discovery to expose users to malicious destinations; delivery can involve compromised sites or attacker-owned pages.
CFAAUS Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. A specific allegation requires the relevant provision, authorization facts and other statutory elements; a technical label alone is insufficient.
EXTENDED GLOSSARY
Additional vocabulary used by the chapters. These definitions share this canonical glossary with the core terms above.
◈ A – F
- Aged domain
- A domain with an earlier registration history. Age and historic backlinks do not guarantee present ranking credit, a clean history or exemption from any ranking system.
- Anchor text
- The visible, clickable words of a link. Context and link purpose matter; exact matching alone does not establish link spam.
- ASN (Autonomous System Number)
- Identifier for an autonomous network. It can support network attribution, but an ASN alone does not authenticate a crawler or prove malicious automation.
- Burstiness
- Variation in sentence length or other features. It is not a reliable standalone test of whether a human or a model wrote a passage.
- Canvas / WebGL fingerprinting
- Rendering a hidden graphic and hashing the tiny hardware-specific differences to identify a device without cookies.
- Churn and burn
- Operating a property for fast revenue with the expectation it will be penalised, then replacing it. The opposite of building an asset.
- Citation
- In local SEO, a business mention with identifying information such as name, address and phone. In research, a citation instead identifies supporting evidence. These meanings should not be conflated.
- Cloud stacking
- Building links through hosted properties on large platforms. Claims of automatic authority transfer because a platform is Google-owned are unsupported here.
- Content spinning
- Rewriting an article by swapping synonyms and phrase variants (often via spintax) to produce many "unique" copies.
- Crawl budget
- A practical description of crawling resources and demand allocated to a site. A URL submission service does not force crawling or indexing.
- Device farm
- Racks of physical phones with real SIMs and GPS used to generate authentic-looking searches, clicks, routes and reviews.
- Disavow
- A file asking Google to disregard specified inbound links. It is not a default response to a backlink spike; see Google’s conditions for considering disavow.
- DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion)
- JavaScript that swaps the phone number shown on a page based on the visitor's traffic source so each channel can be tracked.
- Doorway page
- A page or site made to rank for specific similar queries and funnel users to an intermediate destination, rather than providing the useful destination itself. See the current doorway-abuse policy.
- Drop / expired domain
- A domain whose registration lapsed and became available again. Historical links may remain on the web; their current availability and ranking treatment are not guaranteed.
- Edge function
- Code that runs at a CDN's edge nodes (Cloudflare Workers, Lambda@Edge, Vercel Edge) before a request reaches the origin server.
- Footprint
- A shared observable feature, such as hosting, templates or analytics identifiers. Shared services are common among unrelated sites, so a footprint needs context and corroboration.
◈ G – N
- Ghost form
- A label used for covert contact-data collection through forms or related scripts. Actual browser behavior, consent and data use must be established; legal consequences depend on applicable law and facts.
- GPS spoofing
- Feeding a device or emulator false coordinates so its searches and check-ins appear to come from a target area.
- Helpful Content System
- Historical system launched in 2022. Helpful-content signals became part of core ranking in March 2024; do not describe present ranking as one standalone site-wide classifier. See Google’s systems guide.
- Inverted index
- The search engine data structure mapping every term to the documents containing it; the "inverted indexing method" reverse-engineers which terms top pages share.
- Keyword stuffing
- Unnatural repetition or lists of keywords intended to manipulate search rankings; prohibited by the spam policy. No universal effectiveness or extinction date is established here.
- Link velocity
- The rate of newly observed backlinks. A spike can reflect publicity, sampling changes or manipulation; by itself it does not establish a penalty or attack.
- Local Guide
- A Google Maps contributor program. Participation does not prove that a particular review is authentic, nor establish a price premium or immunity from moderation.
- Local Pack / 3-Pack
- The map-and-three-listings block at the top of local search results; the target of nearly every Local SEO technique.
- Manual action
- An action recorded in Search Console after a human reviewer determines that pages do not comply with applicable policies. Follow the action-specific remediation and review process.
- Money site
- The property that actually earns revenue, which PBNs, tiers and parasites all exist to push.
- NAP
- Name, address and phone: identifying fields used in local-business records. Correctness helps users and entity matching, but no universal ranking weight is asserted.
- Negative SEO
- Attacking a competitor's rankings with spam links, scraped content, fake reviews, hacked injections or malicious listing edits.
- Niche edit
- A link inserted into an existing, already-indexed article on someone else's site, usually paid.
◈ O – Z
- OPSEC
- Operational security: the practices (pseudonyms, VPNs, crypto, separate devices) meant to keep an operator's identity and assets unlinkable.
- Parasite page
- A page published on a high-authority third-party platform to inherit its ranking power; see also site reputation abuse.
- Perplexity
- A model-dependent measure of how predictable a sequence is. Low perplexity alone does not establish AI authorship.
- Pogo-sticking
- A searcher moving from a result back to the results page. Interpretation depends on the task; an individual return is not proof of dissatisfaction or a specified ranking effect.
- Reconsideration request
- The Search Console process for asking Google to lift a manual action after the violation has been fixed.
- Residential proxy
- An IP address belonging to a real home connection, resold so automation looks like ordinary users rather than a datacenter.
- Scaled content abuse
- Google's March 2024 spam policy covering mass-produced pages (AI or otherwise) created to manipulate rankings regardless of how they were made.
- Site reputation abuse
- A policy addressing third-party content that exploits host ranking signals. Consult the August 2026 regional and editorial-integration update for current treatment.
- SpamBrain
- Google’s AI-based spam prevention system; the December 2022 link-spam update described its use for identifying sites buying and selling links.
- Spintax
- Nested {option1|option2} syntax that a spinner expands into many text variants.
- Tiered link building
- A multi-layer link arrangement in which one set points to the target and others point to those linking pages. Tier labels do not prove link quality or ranking credit.
- Tumbler / mixer
- A service that pools and redistributes cryptocurrency to obscure its trail; several have been sanctioned or shut down.
- Web 2.0 property
- A free blog or profile on a platform such as Blogger, WordPress.com or Tumblr, used as a disposable link source.
- YMYL (Your Money or Your Life)
- Google's label for topics that can affect health, finances or safety; held to higher quality standards and scrutinised harder.
- Zombie domain
- An informal term for an inactive or impaired domain retained for redirects or linking. No transferable “remaining authority” is established by the label.
- Partnerka
- A (typically Russian-origin) affiliate program that centralizes storefronts, payment processing and fulfillment while distributed affiliates only generate traffic. The organizing structure of the illegal-pharma vertical.
- Pharma hack
- A site compromise that injects pharmaceutical spam served only to search crawlers (cloaked), with backdoors that regenerate after deletion. Invisible in a normal browser; visible in search results.
- Hacklink
- A marketplace model that sells injected backlinks placed in the source of compromised third-party sites, priced per link. An industrialized form of injection-based SEO poisoning.
- Age-gate cloaking
- Detecting the crawler user-agent to skip an age gate for search engines while showing users the gate. A guideline violation judged by mechanism, not by the compliance motive behind it.
- Traffic trading
- A semi-closed economy, common in the adult tube ecosystem, in which sites exchange or sell visitor traffic to one another outside the open search index.
- Payment chokepoint
- The finding that a spam value chain is most disruptable at the acquiring-bank layer, where alternatives are scarce, rather than at the abundant domain and hosting layers.
Definition sources and limits
Policy terms follow Google’s spam policies; link-attribute semantics follow the nofollow update; current helpful-content terminology follows the systems guide. Read disavow guidance before treating a backlink anomaly as a remediation instruction. Prompt-injection terminology is developed in the research chapter, and the 2023 DOJ trial exhibit establishes the separate public-testimony context for NavBoost. These definitions do not estimate technique success, legal liability or proprietary ranking weights.