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11. Bot

Abbreviation of “robot.” Usually refers to a program which automatically retrieves and indexes data from the web, such as a search engine spider. Also see "spider."

12. Cache

Copies of web pages stored locally on an Internet user's hard drive or within a search engine's database. A cache is the reason why web pages load so quickly when a user hits the Back button in their web browser; the page is not being re-downloaded off of the Internet. Google is unusual among search engines in that it allows Internet users to view the cached version of web pages in its index. Simply click on the word "Cache" next to the search result of interest, and you will be taken to a copy of the page as Googlebot discovered and indexed it. This feature of Google makes it easy to spot cloaking.

13. Cascading style sheets (CSS)

Used to easily manage and manipulate the design of a website.

14. Click-through

The action of clicking on a link to visit a web page.

15. Click-through rate (CTR)

The number of times a link is clicked on divided by the number of times that same link is displayed (called an impression).

16. Cloaking

Serving one version of a page to a human visitor and a different version of the same page to the search engines. This is usually done to "fool" the search engines into giving the page a higher rank than it would normally receive, while making sure the human visitor sees a useful and attractive page. Cloaking is considered unethical by many search engines and could result in your site to be banned.

17. Clustering

Clustering is limiting each represented website to one or two listings within an engine’s results page.

18. Comment tags

Used in a web page's HTML source code to indicate certain information about a section of the page code. Some search engines will consider keywords contained in comment tags for keyword density purposes, others (including Google) will not. Example:

19. Crawler

A program used by search engines to "crawl" the web by following links from page to page. This is how most search engines "find" the web pages that they place in their index. Also referred to as a “spider” or “robot”.

20. Crawling the web

Search engines use crawlers to move between web pages by following the links on the pages. The pages "found" are then ranked using an algorithm and indexed into the search engine database.

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