The Newbie Glossary

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Jun 26, 2006
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I think a lot of newbies are confused by some of the terms here, so this post is to clear up some of that confusion. Please suggest new terms or let me know if my definitions are confusing or wrong.
  • AdSense - Google's contextual ad product. You can show ads served by Google on your website. If people click on the ads, you get a cut of what Google gets.
  • AdWords - The other half of AdSense on Google. AdWords allows you to bid for advertising when a user searches for specified keywords.
  • Affiliate Network - A website that brings together affiliate marketers and the companies looking for their services.
  • Arbitrage - Buying on one market and selling on another to take advantages of economic inefficiencies. In this industry, it generally refers to buying inexpensive ads and directing the traffic to a landing page which contains much more expensive, but related, ads.
  • ASP - Active Server Pages. Same sort of technology as PHP.
  • Black Hat - SEO that is considered ethically lacking. This varies from person to person.
  • CJ - Commission Junction, an affiliate network.
  • Contextual Ad - An ad served based on the context of the page it is served on. The ad server analyzes the page and determines what sort of ad is most appropriate for the page based on its content.
  • CPA - Cost Per Acquisition. Acquisition in this context can mean either a lead or a sale (one or the other, not both). When you are displaying ads, this is how much your advertiser will pay for an acquisition.
  • CPC - Cost Per Click. When you are running advertising, this is the cost you pay each time the ad is clicked.
  • CPL - Cost Per Lead. See CPA.
  • CPM - Cost Per Mil. When advertising, the cost of the ad per thousand impressions.
  • CPS - Cost Per Sale. See CPA.
  • EPC - Earning Per Click. On affiliate networks, advertisers and/or advertisements are generally ranked by the amount of money the affiliate makes each time somebody clicks on the ad. On Commission Junction, EPC is actually average earnings per 100 clicks.
  • MySQL - A free database.
  • PHP - Self-referential acronym meaning PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. This is code written into an HTML page that is executed by the server at the time the page is served. It is used to generate dynamic content.
  • RSS - Rich Site Summary. A method of encoding content into XML for syndication purposes.
  • SEO - Search Engine Optimization. The art of improving your site's rankings in the SERPs. Also "Search Engine Optimizer" if applied to a person.
  • SERPS - Search Engine Results Pages
  • White Hat - SEO that is considered ethically upstanding. This varies from person to person.
  • YPN - Yahoo Publisher Network. Yahoo's contextual ad product, competing with Google's AdSense.
 
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not just to increase their rankings. to increase their EARNINGS. A successful blackhat campaign could have you thrown off google, but still rolling in money, no?
 
One definition of a black-hat type move would be anything that makes you money while making the web a worse place. RSS generated websites with no new content, automated comment posters, randomly generated articles that make no sense would all be black-hat under that definition.

Another possible definition would be contravening the rules set up by the search engines. For instance, you can't click on contextual ads displayed on your own site. You can't serve one type of page to the search engine and another to everybody else. You can't try to hide your ads in the background to make people click them by accident without seeing what they're clicking. Any of that, under that definition, would be black-hat.
 
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