Deindexing
The removal of pages from a search engine’s index, whether deliberate or accidental. Accidental deindexing is usually a stray noindex tag or a robots rule.
Disavow
Telling Google to ignore specific inbound links. Rarely needed now, and overused: most bad links are already discounted automatically.
Domain Authority
A third-party estimate of a site’s strength. Useful for comparing candidates, meaningless as a target, and not a metric any search engine uses.
Duplicate Content
The same or near-identical text at more than one address. Rarely penalized, routinely damaging, because it splits signals that should have accumulated on one page.
We work on this: Website Migration SEO
Dwell Time
How long someone stays before returning to the results. Not a confirmed ranking factor, but a reasonable proxy for whether a page answered the question.
Dynamic Rendering
Serving a pre-rendered version of a page to crawlers. Once a recommended workaround for JavaScript sites, now discouraged in favor of server-side rendering.
Back to the full glossary, or read how we build them in From Zero to Hero.