Glossary - O

obfuscation
A seldom-used term, more often called spamdexing . It refers to the misrepresentation of meta tags and page content in order to gain an unfair advantage in the search engines . The term is sometimes differentiated from spamdexing in that it is used to refer to pages that, through stealth , rank highly although they are poorly optimized . The idea is to deliberately mislead others who might steal the page.

off the page / off the page factors / off the page criteriaThose factors that impact the ranking of a web page but that are not located on the web page itself. Inbound links , anchor text etc. are examples of off the page factors.

operators
"AND", "NOT" and "OR" as used in Boolean Searching .

optimize / optimization
A page is said to be optimized when it has been structured in such a way that it ranks well (on the SERP s) for those keywords it targets. It is a fairly subjective concept. What some see as optimization might be termed spamdexing by others. In the strictest sense, optimization means simply making a page spider -friendly by, for example, using text links rather than image links. In the SEO industry the term is more often used as a collective name for all the "tricks" webmasters use to improve a page's ranking .

origination pageAccording to Chris Sherman's "New Web Map Reveals Previously Unseen ‘Bow Tie' Organizational Structure", origination pages are typically new or obscure pages that haven't yet attracted interest from the larger, more inter-linked web community, or that are only linked to from other origination pages.

outbound link
When site A links to site B, site A has an outbound link and site B has an inbound link .