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SEO Glossary - B
Backlink
A backlink is a link from a page on a third party website to a page on your website.
Sometimes you may hear people calling links between pages on the same site as backlinks, but technically these should be called internal links.
Also see our in depth guide to backlinks.
Backlink Profile
A website's backlink profile is the complete picture of all the backlinks that point to the website and can be categorised by the volume, anchor text, types of links and the sources of those links.
Backup
A backup us a copy of your website code and any related resources like databases, images and other files.
You should ensure everything that makes up your website is regularly being backed up so that should your website be hacked, or otherwise lost, then you can restore it from the backups.
Some hosting providers will automatically be backing up your website for you, others you may need to do this yourself, be sure to find out which and action as appropriate.
Bad Neighborhood
Bad Neighborhood is a concept that says that sites that break Google’s Guidelines can be considered to be in a Bad Neighborhood and that you don’t want to associate with if possible. So this would mainly involve avoiding linking to (or being linked from) a site in a bad neighborhood.
Whether Google also believes in this concept is a different matter, but I would certainly think twice before linking to a site that I believed was penalised by a Google manual action or was using techniques likely to cause it to be in the future.
Bing
The nearest competitor search engine to Google, that said it only has an audience of around 8% of that which Google commands.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Bings equivalent to Google Search Console.
Bingbot
Bings crawler software that crawls the web to discover new and updated content in the same manner as Googlebot.
Blackhat
Blackhat is a term that covers SEO techniques that are against Google’s terms of service and which look to exploit weaknesses in Google's algorithms.
An SEO who uses blackhat techniques may refer to themself as a Blackhat.
The risk with Blackhat techniques is that Google will penalise your website if they detect you exploiting them.
Blog
Coined as a shortening of the term Web-Log, a blog was originally almost like an online personal diary. The term has since become shorthand for any website run in a blog style, with posts ordered by date, most often using Wordpress.
Blogger
Someone who operates and writes for a Blog.
Bounce Rate
The percentage of people who leave a webpage without taking any action on that page, be that clicking a link, filling in a form, watching a video etc.
Bounce rate may be used as a ranking factor, but it hasn’t been definitively proven. It is more likely that bouncing back to the SERPs from a webpage and then selecting another search result may indicate to Google that your page didn’t satisfy their query.
Broken Link
A broken link is a link from a page to another page that no longer exists.
Some people actively search for broken backlinks on third party sites and then contact the site owners to let them know the link is broken and suggest they link to a page on their site instead.
Also see our in depth guide to broken links.
Broken Link Reclamation
You may have backlinks pointing to your web pages on your domain that no longer exist (this can also apply to internal links as well) meaning there is lost link equity.
You can reclaim these links by using a Log File Analyser to scan your web server logs to look for pages on your site being requested which will also have the referring page of the request. 301 redirect any old page URLs you find to the most relevant existing page on your site.
Browser
A browser is an application that allows people to open and interact with websites and webpages, such as Chrome, Safari, etc.
