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SEO Glossary - I

Image Sitemap

A bit like a sitemap.xml is for pages, an image sitemap allows you to tell Google about images on your site and what pages they can be found on. It’s particularly useful if you are trying to get your images indexed so they can be found in Google Image search.

Index

When people talk about Google’s “Index” they are referring to Google's database of web pages that it is able to rank and return as results for search queries. A web page has to be in the Index for it to be able to even be considered as a search result. 

Indexed

A webpage that is in Google’s index is said to be “Indexed”

Indexing

Indexing is the process by which Google places a webpage into its index.

Infographic

An infographic is the visual representation of data or information in a way that is attractive and easy to digest.

Infographics are often produced as a form of link bait in the hope that third party websites will link to them. Often sites producing infographics will allow other sites to share the content in return for an attribution link.

Information Gain

Information gain is a concept that is included in a Google patent on “Contextual estimation of link information gain” that was awarded in 2022.

In the patent it describes how Google might rank pages based on how likely they were to bring new information (the information gain) to a browser compared with pages that previous pages had surfaced.

This would be achieved by calculating an “information gain score” for every page after every query, page view and search engine results page view and then recalculating after every new interaction.

By doing so it should ensure that a searcher then continues to surface new information rather than being stuck only seeing pages that all contain the same or very similar content.

Informational Intent

Informational Intent is a classification of any search query where the user is trying to find information that will answer a question in informational terms, rather than trying to find a product or service.

Intent

Every search query that people use with Google can be considered to have an intent. The intent is what the end goal purpose of what the person is searching for.

Intents can vary widely across the infinite possible search queries, but commonly they are classified as belonging to one of the following types: “Informational”, “Navigational”, “Commercial”, “Transactional”.