SEO glossary entries for ‘L’

Landing Page
A web page through which first time visitors enter after clicking-through a search engine result. Its content will typically closely match the user's search terms; perhaps, but not necessarily as a result of search engine optimisation (SEO). Landing Pages may be distinguished from ‘Gateway Pages’ or ‘Doorway Pages’ insofar as they are located within the main site structure and visible within its primary navigation. Landing Pages are a form of ‘Entry Page’ insofar as they constitute a regular point of entry, but they are primarily entry points for search engine generated traffic. Other entry pages may be popular for reasons entirely unrelated to search, e.g. simply because they have lots of inbound links or because their URLs appear on company promotional material.
Landing Page Optimization
See ‘Landing Page Optimization’.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
Uses word association to identify what a page is about. More technically speaking, it is an indexing and retrieval method that uses Singular value decomposition (SVD) to identify relationships between the terms and concepts in an unstructured collection of text. LSI is founded on the observation that words used in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. So, in theory one can extract the conceptual ‘meanings’ from a body of text by comparing the associations between its terms with those which occur in similar contexts. see wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_indexing and wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis
LDR
See ‘Link Domain Relevancy’
Lead Generation
The process of collecting and collating contact information so as to identify potential potential customers to contact in some way.
Leaking PageRank
The nonsense hypothesis that linking to other web pages can reduce the PageRank of your web page.
The process of attracting inbound links to your content, no matter what means are employed to do so.
Braking down link code, link URLs, link anchor text, link sources and targets, etc into component parts which can be measured and evaluated to identify meaningful patterns, e.g. to identify which link texts or which link sources bring in the highest proportions of high value conversions.
For human web users, a link anchor is simply the web content (traditionally, underlined text) that they click on to activate a hypertext link. For a web designer or developer, however, a link anchor is an HTML <a> element which has an href attribute containing a valid URL as its value and the textual or other content between the <a> element's opening and closing tags. The letter a in <a> is, effectively, shorthand for the word anchor. Links are known as anchors, because they fasten the beginning and end of a link to particular pages (or to particular page fragments), as a marine anchor holds boats to the seabed.
Total value of inbound links to a page or site.
Downloadable files or content that’s published on the internet for the purpose of increasing the number of links to a web page.
See ‘Google Bombing’.
Link Breakage is the process by which links cease to function, for whatever reason. Link breakage may be temporary and remediable (e.g. if it is caused by changes in the name/address of the link anchor or target) or it may be permanent (e.g. if the source page has been permanently deleted). Permanent link breakage is often referred to as ‘Link Rot’ or, less often ‘Link Death’.
See ‘Link Breakage’ and ‘Link Rot’
Software which tests the functionality of web links by analysing their HTML encoding and by requesting the URLs contained in those links.
Is a technique which many SEO experts suggest that Google applies to newly discovered links, i.e. their value is significantly lower that the value of the same link, once it has been around for a certain amount of time.
See ‘Link Rot’
The process of asking Google to ignore ‘Backlinks’ to your content, which believe give a misleading impression of the site and its contents.
The range and variety of link types and sources. Generally speaking, greater diversity will enhance a search engine's ‘trust’ in your site and its pages. This increased trust could be at the expense of your search engine rating for relevance, unless the diverse links and sources can still be related to one or more related topic groups.
Link Domain Relevancy (LDR) is a term used in SEO to describe the topical closeness of a web site to those from which it receives links. The wiser sort of SEO specialist always assumed that sites with high proportions of links from topically distant sites would rank lower than sites with high proportions of links from topically similar sights (other things being equal).
HTML <link> elements are used to automatically link script, stylesheet and other HTML pages into a given web page. <link> elements are placed within the page's <head> element and are invisible to non-inquisitive users. Unlike the visible links created by anchor elements in the body of a web page, users do not interact with <link> elements, nor can they activate them. <link> elements are used only by browsers and other software, to fetch additional material with which they can enhance the usefulness of the page for the user.
Total number of inbound ‘equity links’ to your site, or a page on your site.
You link to one or more pages on a another website in return for that site linking to one or more of your web pages.
A group of web sites that all hyperlink to the other sites in the same group, with the purpose of spamming the index of a search engine, i.e. to artificially inflate the search engine's count of links to pages on sites within the farm, or to artificially inflate the inbound link count on a client site, outside the farm itself. Most of the pages and sites in a link farm are generated automatically by computer programs drawing on a variety of digital data sources and services. Given enough time, the regular patterns in such programmed behaviour makes it possible for search engine algorithms to identify link farms and their members.
The process of building and maintaining link farms, usually for the purpose of directing search engine traffic to given websites, for profit. Link farmers may be the actual owners of sites which benefit from such traffic, but more often than not, they simply charge the ‘beneficiary’ for the service. Link farming has some of the characteristics of a protection racket, i.e. when the user of the service ceases paying for it, they quickly find themselves with little traffic and few customers. See ‘Link Farm’.
Loose slang for the implicit endorsement that any link gives to the receiving page. The amount of link juice passed by a given link (or set of links) was, historically, associated with the amount of ‘PageRank’ that they passed. Nowadays the amount of link juice passed is typically associated with a whole bundle of, largely undifferentiated, qualitive and quantative indicators of link value.
Used to indicate the quantity and quality of sites that link to a given website.
A link profile is an overview of the quantity and quality of different types of hypertext links going to and from a given website. A link profile can be as simple as a bar chart or table which counts the number of links in a range of categories, but may alternatively use complex heuristics to compare and value different types of link over time and against the link profiles of competitors. Many link profiling tools generate an overall score for the link profile quality of one or more sites. While the ontological value of individual link profile scores is almost always highly dubious, they can provide a consistent measure of site performance over time and against a given set of competitors. So long as you are constantly aware of what such scores are actually measuring and their limitations, they can provide important clues about why specific competitors are more or less successful in achieving high rankings on SERPs. See ‘Natural Link Profile’.
Link Profile Tool is the proprietary name for a Google Docs-based tool which competitively analyses the ‘Link Profile’ of you and your competitors, aiming to reveal anomalous behaviour. Written by Tom Anthony.
A link profile tool is any software tool which generates a ‘Link Profile’.
Is simply the removal of links which have an unwanted effect on your SERPs rank for target keywords. It includes the removal of links within your site and to your site. Since it may prove impossible to prune links which do not belong to you, Google makes provision for ‘Link disavowel’.
Link quality is the value attributed to the links which target a given page or whih are anchored on a given page.
Link quantity is the number of in-bound (or out-bound) links which target (or leave) a given website or web page.
Link risk is some measure or evaluation of the risks to your website posed by hypertext links to the site, or by links to content about your site and business. It is often associated with the general concept of reputational risk, but in SEO terms it is typically an evaluation of the potential damage that hypertext links can do to your ranking in ‘SERPs’. Not to be confused with the proprietary affiliate marketing service called LinkRisk.
Link Rot is the process by which links become permanently unavailable, typically, because their source pages have been deleted or are no longer accessible via the web. The term should be distinguished from the similar, but not identical terms: ‘Link Breakage’ or ‘Link Breaking’. Also known as ‘Linkrot’ or ‘Link Death’.
The practice of tagging links to off-topic bits of site content with the ‘no-follow’ HTML attribute, for the specific purpose of excluding their keywords from Google’s evaluation of the whole site’s topical range. The original affect of link sculpting was to artificially raise the site’s salience for its primary target keywords. Insofar as this is, essentially, and example of ‘cloaking’, it is explicitly disapproved of. And, since it is trivially easy for Google to detect, no longer works. Whether its detection has a definitively negative effect on a site’s rank is unknown.
A link source is the web page or site from which a link originates, i.e. the page or site on which the ‘Link Anchor’ is published.
The HTML <link> element, a self-closing element.
Buying or selling targeted hypertext links, for money.
Link Velocity is the speed with which your site gains or loses links (especially ‘Backlinks’) over time. A massive change (up or down) in a site or page's link velocity will alert search engines to the possibility that the site has been trying to artificially boost its ‘PageRank’, i.e. by purchasing backlinks or ceasing to pay for previously paid-for backlinks. Obviously, a massive increase in backlinks can occur for perfectly legitimate reasons, e.g. as a result of highly successful press, email, or social media campaigns over short periods of time. So a range of other factors, most notably the sources of newly gained or lost links, will be considered before a search engine concludes that a change in link velocity is indicative of bad behaviour. ‘Positive Link Velocity’ and ‘Negative Link Velocity’.
See ‘Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search’.
Linkrot
See ‘Link Rot’
Linkscape
Link analysis and link building tool created by SEOMoz.org.
Long Tail
Phrase coined by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine (1994), to encapsulate the notion that selling a lot of semi-popular products will generate small units of income which may cumulatively equal or surpass the total income generated by the very popular products. Very little, if any empirical evidence exists for this ever happening in the real world, but the popularity of the phrase reflects the massively reduced cost of producing, storing and distributing certain products and services sold over the web, i.e. the marginal profit on less popular, but web-saleable, products has increased with the spread of the web. The phrase is often used to describe an SEO strategy which targets the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of many less popular search terms, rather a few common terms over which there is furious competition. A long tail SEO strategy is often adopted by startups, who cannot initially hope to compete with established sites for high value search terms, but can accumulate enough small traffic sources to gradually raise their competitive position.
Long Tail Keywords
Words and phrases which only a minority of searchers will use to find a given item. According to Zipf’s Law there will usually be very many more Long Tail Keywords than their opposite (‘Broad Head Keywords’).
Searches that use more specific and less popular search terms. The opposite of ‘Broad Head Search’.
Long-term Content
Website content which is maintained over a long period of time. It may or may not continue to be current, relevant and topical.
lr
Is a google web search parameter which restricts earch results to a given natural language.
LSI
See ‘Latent Semantic Indexing’.

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