Step Wise SEO

Just like any other topic with a big online following, SEO has its own colorful vocabulary.

There are far too many terms to include here, but here’s a sampling of what you might come across in your own SEO endeavors:

SERP
An acronym that stands for “Search Engine Results Page,” that is, the listings you see when you use a search engine.

White hat/black hat
Stereotypically speaking, white hat refers to “squeaky clean” optimization activities, ones that stay squarely within the search engines’ guidelines.

Black hat refers to under-the-radar (and often below-the-belt) activities, such as quickly launching a site with poor-quality, scraped, or no content; making some quick cash; and then dumping the domain and starting over with another site.

There are also SEOs who proclaim to be gray hat, who do their work somewhere in the middle.

Tripping a filter
Since search engine algorithms are almost entirely automated, infractions and slipups are often caught and penalized via automatic analysis.

When a page has set off an algorithmic red flag, SEOs say it has tripped a filter. This is especially common talk in forums, where you may see someone speculate, “My page is gone from the index. I think I tripped a duplicate content filter.”

Everflux
A term used by Matt Cutts of Google to refer to the constant addition of newly crawled and recrawled sites into Google’s index, resulting in minor ranking shifts that occur on a daily or even hourly basis.