Glossary Terms
M
Malda, Rob
Founder of Slashdot.org, a popular editorially driven technology news forum.
Manual Review
All major search engines combine a manual review process with their automated relevancy algorithms to help
catch search spam and train their relevancy algorithms. Abnormal usage data or link growth patterns may also
flag sites for manual review.
See also:
Inktomi Spam Database Left Open to Public - article about Inktomi's spam database from 2001
Search Bistro - links to Google's General Guidelines on Random Query Evaluation [PDF] and Google's Spam
Guide for Raters
Google Image Labeler - example of how humans can be used to review content
Mechanical Turk
Amazon.com program which allows you to hire humans to perform easy tasks that computers are bad at.
See also:
Mechanical Turk
Google Image Labeler - image labeling game
Human Computation Speech Video at Google
Meme
In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins defines a meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation."
Many people use the word meme to refer to self spreading or viral ideas.
See also:
Techmeme - meme tracker which shows technology ideas that are currently spreading on popular technology
blogs
Meta Description
The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two of content which describes the content of the page.
A good meta description tag should:
be relevant and unique to the page;
reinforce the page title; and
focus on including offers and secondary keywords and phrases to help add context to the page title.
Relevant meta description tags may appear in search results as part of the page description below the page
title.
The code for a meta description tag looks like this
<meta name="Description" content="Your meta description here. " / >
See also:
Free meta tag generator - offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.
Meta Keywords
The meta keywords tag is a tag which can be used to highlight keywords and keyword phrases which the page
is targeting.
The code for a meta keyword tag looks like this
<meta name="Keywords" content="keyword phrase, another keyword, yep another, maybe one more ">
Many people spammed meta keyword tags and searchers typically never see the tag, so most search engines
do not place much (if any) weight on it. Many SEO professionals no longer use meta keywords tags.
See also:
Free meta tag generator - offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.
Meta Refresh
A meta tag used to make a browser refresh to another URL location.
A meta refresh looks like this
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;url=http://www.site.com/folder/page.htm">
Generally in most cases it is preferred to use a 301 or 302 redirect over a meta refresh.
Meta Search
A search engine which pulls top ranked results from multiple other search engines and rearranges them into a
new result set.
See also:
Myriad Search - an ad free meta search engine
Meta Tags
People generally refer to meta descriptions and meta keywords as meta tags. Some people also group the
page title in with these.
The page title is highly important.
The meta description tag is somewhat important.
The meta keywords tag is not that important.
Microsoft
Maker of the popular Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser.
Mindshare
A measure of the amount of people who think of you or your product when thinking of products in your
category.
Sites with strong mindshare, top rankings, or a strong memorable brand are far more likely to be linked at than
sites which are less memorable and have less search exposure. The link quality of mindshare related links
most likely exceeds the quality of the average link on the web. If you sell non-commodities, personal
recommendations also typically carry far greater weight than search rankings alone.
See also:
Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] - Mike Grehan article about how top rankings are self reinforcing
Mirror Site
Site which mirrors (or duplicates) the contents of another website.
Generally search engines prefer not to index duplicate content. The one exception to this is that if you are a
hosting company it might make sense to offer free hosting or a free mirror site to a popular open source
software site to build significant link equity.
Movable Type
For sale blogging software which allows you to host a blog on your website.
Movable Type is typically much harder to install that Wordpress is.
See also:
Movable Type
MSN Search
Search engine built by Microsoft. MSN is the default search provider in Internet Explorer.
See also:
MSN Search
MSN Search Features, Documentation, & Guidelines
Multi Dimensional Scaling
The process of taking shapshots of documents in a database to discover topical clusters through the use of
latent semantic indexing. Multi dimensional scaling is more efficient than singular vector decomposition since
only a rough approximation of relevance is necessary when combined with other ranking criteria.
MySpace
One of the most popular social networking sites, largely revolving around connecting musicians to fans and
having an easy to use blogging platform.
See also:
MySpace.com
N & O
M
Malda, Rob
Founder of Slashdot.org, a popular editorially driven technology news forum.
Manual Review
All major search engines combine a manual review process with their automated relevancy algorithms to help
catch search spam and train their relevancy algorithms. Abnormal usage data or link growth patterns may also
flag sites for manual review.
See also:
Inktomi Spam Database Left Open to Public - article about Inktomi's spam database from 2001
Search Bistro - links to Google's General Guidelines on Random Query Evaluation [PDF] and Google's Spam
Guide for Raters
Google Image Labeler - example of how humans can be used to review content
Mechanical Turk
Amazon.com program which allows you to hire humans to perform easy tasks that computers are bad at.
See also:
Mechanical Turk
Google Image Labeler - image labeling game
Human Computation Speech Video at Google
Meme
In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins defines a meme as "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation."
Many people use the word meme to refer to self spreading or viral ideas.
See also:
Techmeme - meme tracker which shows technology ideas that are currently spreading on popular technology
blogs
Meta Description
The meta description tag is typically a sentence or two of content which describes the content of the page.
A good meta description tag should:
be relevant and unique to the page;
reinforce the page title; and
focus on including offers and secondary keywords and phrases to help add context to the page title.
Relevant meta description tags may appear in search results as part of the page description below the page
title.
The code for a meta description tag looks like this
<meta name="Description" content="Your meta description here. " / >
See also:
Free meta tag generator - offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.
Meta Keywords
The meta keywords tag is a tag which can be used to highlight keywords and keyword phrases which the page
is targeting.
The code for a meta keyword tag looks like this
<meta name="Keywords" content="keyword phrase, another keyword, yep another, maybe one more ">
Many people spammed meta keyword tags and searchers typically never see the tag, so most search engines
do not place much (if any) weight on it. Many SEO professionals no longer use meta keywords tags.
See also:
Free meta tag generator - offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.
Meta Refresh
A meta tag used to make a browser refresh to another URL location.
A meta refresh looks like this
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="10;url=http://www.site.com/folder/page.htm">
Generally in most cases it is preferred to use a 301 or 302 redirect over a meta refresh.
Meta Search
A search engine which pulls top ranked results from multiple other search engines and rearranges them into a
new result set.
See also:
Myriad Search - an ad free meta search engine
Meta Tags
People generally refer to meta descriptions and meta keywords as meta tags. Some people also group the
page title in with these.
The page title is highly important.
The meta description tag is somewhat important.
The meta keywords tag is not that important.
Microsoft
Maker of the popular Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser.
Mindshare
A measure of the amount of people who think of you or your product when thinking of products in your
category.
Sites with strong mindshare, top rankings, or a strong memorable brand are far more likely to be linked at than
sites which are less memorable and have less search exposure. The link quality of mindshare related links
most likely exceeds the quality of the average link on the web. If you sell non-commodities, personal
recommendations also typically carry far greater weight than search rankings alone.
See also:
Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] - Mike Grehan article about how top rankings are self reinforcing
Mirror Site
Site which mirrors (or duplicates) the contents of another website.
Generally search engines prefer not to index duplicate content. The one exception to this is that if you are a
hosting company it might make sense to offer free hosting or a free mirror site to a popular open source
software site to build significant link equity.
Movable Type
For sale blogging software which allows you to host a blog on your website.
Movable Type is typically much harder to install that Wordpress is.
See also:
Movable Type
MSN Search
Search engine built by Microsoft. MSN is the default search provider in Internet Explorer.
See also:
MSN Search
MSN Search Features, Documentation, & Guidelines
Multi Dimensional Scaling
The process of taking shapshots of documents in a database to discover topical clusters through the use of
latent semantic indexing. Multi dimensional scaling is more efficient than singular vector decomposition since
only a rough approximation of relevance is necessary when combined with other ranking criteria.
MySpace
One of the most popular social networking sites, largely revolving around connecting musicians to fans and
having an easy to use blogging platform.
See also:
MySpace.com
N & O
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