SEO Glossary: H

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Hallway page: a page that serves as an index to a group of pages that you would like the search engine spiders to find. Once a search engine spider indexes the hallway page, it should also follow all the links on that hallway page and in turn index those pages as well. [edit]
Heading tag: An HTML tag that is often used to denote a page or section heading on a web page. Search engines pay special attention to text that is marked with a heading tag, as such text is set off from the rest of the page content as being more important. [edit]
Hidden keywords: Keywords that are placed in the HTML source in such a way that these words are not viewable by human visitors looking at the rendered web page. [edit]
Hidden Text - SEO Spam Tactic: Hidden Text is a SEO spam tactic to hide contextual html text from human visitors to a webpage, however making it available to search engines to spider the text.

The theory is that if you place more relevant html text content on the page rich with targeted keywords, then it will assist the page gaining ranking within search engine results. Some website owners do like text content on their page because they believe it negatively affects their brand and user web experience. So, they hide the text in the hope that the page will still rank for targeted keywords.

Hidden Text is an illegal technique as search engines consider it search engine spam. By undertaking this practice, it will eventually harm natural search performance of a website.

Google Quality Guidelines specify to �Avoid hidden text or hidden links�.

Yahoo!�s Search Content Quality Guidelines also considers �the use of text or links hidden from the user� unwanted.

Submitted by Jacqui Jones - Netconcepts [edit]
Hijacking of Websites: Hijacking of websites is a practice that makes search engines believe that a specific website resides at another URL. It is a form of search engine spam and cloaking. The reason why this method is undertaken by spammers is to increase rankings in search engine result pages. Webpage Hijacking is an illegal spam tactic.

When spiders crawl websites and they discover two pages with the same content, the search engine will decide which is the main url while the other is not indexed. Spammers will use tactics to ensure that their page is the one that is chosen by the search engine.

An example of website hijacking is where there are two pages with exactly the same content but at different addresses � company.com (the real site) and company.net (the rogue site). Spammers use tactics to ensure their site ranks above the real site.

Submitted by Jacqui Jones - Netconcepts
[edit]
Hits: a download of a file from a web server. Hits do not correlate with web page visits. Every graphic on a web page counts as a hit. Thus, a single access of a web page with 20 unique graphics on it register as 21 hits - 20 for the graphics and 1 for the HTML page. Web metrics guru Jim Sterne says hits "stand for How Idiots Track Success." People who talk in terms of hits are usually either ignorant or are trying to snow their boss into thinking the website is doing better than it really is. [edit]
Homepage: A homepage is the main page of a website. Like a cover of a book or the front of a store, its function is to welcome people and to inform them of the overall purpose of the website. The homepage offers an index of navigation that organizes content and leads to other parts of the website.

The homepage usually accumulates the most PageRank score since its url is usually where other sites link to the most. The url of a homepage usually ends in a domain name extension such as .com, .org, .edu, etc.

Other terms used to describe a homepage are front page, main web page and webserver directory index.

It�s interesting to note that in some countries such as Japan, Korea and Germany, the term �homepage� usually refers to the whole website, not just the first page.

Even though the home page is designed to be the entry point of the website, people can go directly to other pages within the site without ever seeing the front page.

Submitted by Jacqui Jones - Netconcepts
[edit]
HTML: Stands for HyperText Markup Language. The programming language used to mark up web content and display it in a formatted manner. It's up to the web browser software, e.g. Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape, to render HTML source. [edit]
HTML Source: The raw, unrendered programming code. It can be accessed in Internet Explorer by going to the "View" menu then selecting "Source". [edit]
HTTP 301 � Status Code Definition: The 301 status code means the URI requested has �Moved Permanently� and has been assigned a new URI. Any future requests should use one of the returned URIs.

It is best practice to use 301 Redirects when multiple copies of the same document reside on different URIs. This will ensure that duplicate content is removed from the site and each and every unique page will only have one URL. [edit]
HTTP 302 � Status Code Definition: The 302 status code means that the document requested is �Found� however temporarily resides under a different URL. Since a permanent redirect has not been used, the client should continue to use the original requested URL for future requests. [edit]
HTTP 400 � Status Code Definition: The 400 status code means a �Bad Request� stating that the server is not able to understand the document request due to a malformed syntax. The user is required to modify its request prior to repeating it. [edit]
HTTP 401 � Status Code Definition: The 401 status code means �Unauthorized�. This server requests user authentication prior to fulfilling the document request. [edit]
HTTP 403 � Status Code Definition: The 403 status code means �Forbidden�. The server understood the request, however is refusing to fulfill it. The webmaster may wish to alert the user why their request has been denied. If the organization does not wish to provide this reason then a 404 (Not Found) status code can be displayed instead. [edit]
HTTP 404 � Status Code Definition: The response error message �404� represents a document �Not Found�. This means that the client was able to communicate with the server, however could not find the requested document. Alternatively, the server could be configured to not fulfill the request and not provide a reason why. [edit]
HTTP 410 � Status Code Definition: Similar to a 404 Not Found error message, the 410 status code states that the requested document is �intentionally gone�, is no longer available and there is no forwarding address.

The 410 status code is usually used for limited display documents such as promotional information. It is up to the discretion of the web master to determine at what point to remove the 410 status message. [edit]
HTTP 500 � Status Code Definition: The 500 status code error message states that there was an internal server error which has prevented the document from being fulfilled. [edit]
HTTP 501 � Status Code Definition: The 501 status code message is displayed when the server does not recognize the document request method. The server is not capable of fulfilling this request and states the request was �Not Implemented�. [edit]
HTTP � Hypertext Markup Language: HTTP stands for hypertext markup language and is the main markup language for creation of web pages. It defines how data is structured and informs the web browser how the page is to be displayed with the use of formatting text and images.

Some of the page elements that can be coded with HTML include Page Titles, Text (paragraphs, lines and phrases), Lists (unordered, ordered and definition lists), Tables, Forms, Basic HTML Data Types (character data, colors, lengths, content types, etc) and much more.

The source html code of any webpage is available by simply clicking �Page Source� in a web browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.

HTML is not a programming language and therefore is quite static in nature. It is considered to be a subset of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).

Tim Berners Lee first described HTML and it was publicly available in 1991 via a document called �HTML Tags�.

HTML became an international standard (ISO/IEC 15445:2000) and its specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) of which commercial software vendors offer input.

Submitted by Jacqui Jones � Netconcepts [edit]
Hubs: Hubs are a range of centralized websites linking to many related topical Authority websites. Characteristics of a hub are:

1. Many outbound links to sites (typically Authority sites) that contain relevant content

2. The content on the hub site is highly focused

A site can either be a hub, an authority, both, or neither. An authority or hub site will get preferential treatment by a search engine algorithm that incorporates �topic distillation�.

Submitted by Jacqui Jones - Netconcepts [edit]
Hyperlinks: see "links" [edit]

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