SEO Glossary - M

Main Content (MC)

The Main Content (MC) of a web page is that content which is the purpose of the pages existence and which helps it achieve the purpose of the page. This could be a text article, and image, video, tool, game, user generated content or similar.

It’s the content that is the reason that a user has visited the page for.

Main Content is one of the three types of page content as defined by Google together with Supplementary Content (SC) and Ad Content (Ads).

Main Content is covered in detail in the Google Quality Rater Guidelines.

Manual Penalty

A manual penalty (also known as a Manual Action) is one where a member of staff at Google has manually viewed your website and the metrics that Google holds for it (such as its backlink profile) and has determined that you have contravened one or more of Google’s Guidelines.

A penalty is then given to your entire website or pages within your website. The penalty can vary in severity.

If your site is registered in Google Search Console you will be notified by email and inside the search console that you have been manually penalised and for what reason. You can make a reconsideration request if you believe the penalty has been unfairly given or if you have since taken steps to remedy the cause of the penalty.

Marketplace

A marketplace is a type of website that brings together buyers and sellers who are independent of the website. Examples include Ebay, Etsy, Amazon.

Merchant

A merchant is a term used in affiliate marketing to describe a company with a website that sells a product which works with affiliates who drive potential customers to the merchants website.

Meta Description

A page meta description is a HTML tag that is put in the head of a HTML page (so not visible on the page in the browser) that is space for a website to give a description of what the content and purpose of the page is.

Google will sometimes use this descriptive text as the description of the webpage in the Search Results. However if the meta description is missing, or if it believes it can provide a better description, then Google will write its own descriptions.

Meta Keywords

Meta Keywords is a HTML tag that can be put in the head of a HTML page (so not visible on the page in the browser) that is space for a website to give a list of keywords the page targets.

Because this is so easy to manipulate it has long been ignored by search engines as a ranking factor so there is no SEO reason why you should be using them.

Meta Robots Tag

The meta robots tag is an HTML element that allows you to define directions to crawlers whether to crawl a page (or not) and whether or not to index a page.

Mobile-First Indexing

As so much web traffic is nowadays consumed on mobile phones Google now will crawl, index and rank primarily based on the mobile version of a website.

Migration

A migration is any event where you make major changes to a website, such as moving a website from one platform to another (say from one CMS to a new CMS) or from one design to another design, or from its current domain to a new domain name.

Migration events are extremely risky times for SEO. Done correctly there can be minimal or even no negative effect. Done incorrectly they can have major negative effects on search rankings.

Money Site

Blackhat SEOs will often refer to their Money Sites, these are their sites that they aim to make money from. They will often be much more cautious with the techniques they use to rank their money sites as they don’t want to see them easily penalised.

Multivariate Test

Multivariate testing is very similar to A/B Split Testing, however, instead of just the original and a new version being tested against each other, in multivariate testing many different versions are created and tested against each other at once.

This can lead to faster evolutions of testing, but it requires a very large amount of traffic to generate statistically significant results.