Content

Affiliate SEO

Affiliate marketing SEO

Earning search traffic for content monetised through affiliate commissions; permitted by Google when the content adds substantial original value.

AI-generated content policy

Generative AI content

Google's position that content is judged on quality and purpose, not method of production — but mass-produced AI content made to game rankings is spam.

Author authority

Author E-E-A-T · Bylines

The credibility a named author brings to content, evidenced by verifiable expertise, publication history and presence across trusted sources.

Commercial investigation intent

Commercial intent

Queries from users comparing options before buying — 'best', 'vs', 'alternatives', 'review' — sitting between informational and transactional intent.

Content audit

Content inventory

A systematic review of every page on a site against performance, quality and business value criteria, producing a keep/improve/merge/remove decision per URL.

Content brief

SEO brief

A specification given to a writer covering the target query set, intent, required subtopics, angle, sources, internal links and success criteria.

Content decay

Traffic decay

The gradual decline in a page's search traffic as it ages, competitors update, intent shifts or the underlying information goes out of date.

Content pruning

Content consolidation

Systematically removing, merging or noindexing low-value pages so a site's indexed footprint reflects only content worth ranking.

Content refresh

Content update

Substantively updating an existing page — new data, corrected facts, restructured sections — to restore or improve its relevance and rankings.

Content syndication

Republishing

Republishing the same content on third-party sites for reach; without correct canonicalisation it creates duplicates that can outrank the original.

Doorway pages

Gateway pages · Bridge pages

Pages or sites created to rank for many similar queries and funnel users to a single destination, providing no unique value themselves.

E-E-A-T

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness · EAT

The framework in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines for assessing page quality: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, with Trust at the centre.

Editorial guidelines

Editorial policy

A published statement of how a publisher sources, reviews, corrects and discloses its content, supporting trust for readers, raters and AI systems.

Entity

Named entity

A distinct, uniquely identifiable thing — a person, place, organisation, product or concept — that a search engine can reason about independently of the words used to name it.

Evergreen content

Content whose relevance persists over time, as opposed to news or seasonal pieces, though it still requires periodic maintenance to stay accurate.

Helpful, reliable, people-first content

Helpful content

Google's stated content standard: content created primarily for people, that demonstrates first-hand expertise and leaves readers feeling their need was met.

Information gain

Novel information

The amount of genuinely new information a document adds beyond what the user has already seen in other results for the same query.

Keyword cannibalisation

Cannibalization

Multiple pages on a site competing for the same query, so search engines alternate between them and none establishes a strong position.

Keyword difficulty

KD · Competition score

A vendor-specific 0-100 score estimating how hard it is to rank on page one for a query, usually derived from the link profiles of current top results.

Keyword research

Query research

Identifying and prioritising the queries a business should target, using volume, difficulty, intent, business value and current visibility.

Knowledge Graph

KG

Google's database of entities and the relationships between them, used to disambiguate queries, power knowledge panels and ground generative answers.

Long-tail keyword

Long tail

A specific, low-volume query, usually longer and more precise, that collectively with millions of others makes up the majority of search demand.

Passage ranking

Passage indexing · Passage-based ranking

Google's ability to rank a page based on the relevance of a specific passage within it, even when the page overall is about something broader.

Pillar page

Hub page · Ultimate guide

A broad, comprehensive page that introduces a whole topic and links out to detailed supporting pages within the same cluster.

Programmatic SEO

pSEO · Scaled page generation

Generating large numbers of pages from structured data against templated query patterns, such as 'flights from X to Y' or '[job] salary in [city]'.

Readability

Reading level

How easily a reader can understand a text, influenced by sentence length, vocabulary, structure and formatting; not a direct ranking factor.

Search intent

User intent · Query intent

The underlying goal behind a query — typically classified as informational, navigational, commercial investigation or transactional.

Search Quality Rater Guidelines

QRG · Quality Raters Guidelines

Google's published manual for the external human raters who evaluate search results, defining Page Quality, Needs Met and concepts like E-E-A-T and YMYL.

Search volume

Monthly search volume · MSV

The estimated number of times a query is searched in a period, usually derived from Google Ads data and modelled by third-party tools.

Semantic search

Retrieval based on the meaning of a query and documents rather than literal keyword matching, using entities, context and learned representations.

SERP intent match

Intent alignment

The practice of inferring what Google rewards for a query by analysing the page types, formats and features currently ranking, and matching them.

TF-IDF

Term frequency-inverse document frequency

A classical information-retrieval weighting that scores a term by how often it appears in a document offset by how common it is across the corpus.

Thin content

Low-value content

Pages with little or no substantive value of their own — scraped, auto-generated, doorway-like, or near-empty templated pages.

Topic cluster

Content hub

A content model where one broad pillar page links to and from many specific supporting pages covering subtopics of the same subject.

Topical authority

Topical depth

The degree to which a site demonstrates comprehensive, credible coverage of a subject area rather than isolated pages on scattered topics.

Trust signals

The observable characteristics that make a site and its content credible: accurate information, transparent ownership, clear contact details, sourcing and disclosure.

YMYL

Your Money or Your Life

Topics that could significantly affect a person's health, financial stability, safety or wellbeing, held to a higher quality standard by Google's raters.