This is Part 3 of our jargon busting look at common SEO terms. Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part  2 for more.

PageRank

PageRank is a score between 0 and 10 that Google assigns to every page it crawls. It is an indication of both the number of other sites on the web that link to that page and the PageRank of those sites. The theory is that the greater the PageRank, the more authority it has in the eyes of Google. PageRank will come in time and should not be something to concern yourself with too much. External sites will only decide to link to your pages if they think they offer something interesting or relevant to a subject. Offering quality content is the best way to increase your PageRank

301 redirects

A 301 redirect (also known as a permanent redirect) is used to redirect visitors when a page has moved from its original address to a new one, if for example you’re changing your website address from http://www.example.com to http://www.anotherexample.com.

While there are many ways to redirect a user from one page to another, the important thing about a 301 redirect is that search engines will pass any PageRank from the old to the new page. This means setting up a new domain does not mean starting your SEO from scratch

It’s important to remember that a 301 redirect is classed as a permanent redirect by search engines meaning your new website address will appear in search results. If you want to temporarily redirect visitors to a different page then use a 302 redirect which is temporary.

A 301 or 302 redirect can be done in different ways depending on your server and the server-side language used.

404/broken links

You’ve probably seen this before:
404 errors indicate a poor user experience to search engines

This is a 404 error, also known as a broken link. It simply means that the page/image/anything you are trying to load was not found. The 404 comes from the response code sent to the browser. There can be many reasons for getting a 404 error on a page: the referring link on a page has been mistyped, the target page has been removed completely or maybe the site is currently down.

404 errors are not good for SEO as they indicate a bad user experience to search engines and pages that are not found when the crawlers comes to visit will not feature in search results, even if they were only temporarily unavailable.

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That’s all for now but I’m sure there’s plenty more terms and phrases complete SEO newbies stumble on. If there’s anything you’d like explaining please leave a comment or join the discussion in our SEO Forum.

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