Ranking

Ranking is the process by which search engines display websites in such a way that the most important sites appear on the top.

Reciprocal Link

Reciprocal linking happens when two sites give links to each other.

Redirect

Redirect happens when the internet user is automatically taken to another web page address without him/her clicking for that page. Redirects are not encouraged by search engines.

Registrar

A company which allows you to register domain names.

Relative Link

A link which shows the relation of the current URL to the URL of the page being linked at. Some links only show relative link paths instead of having the entire reference URL within the a href tag. Due to canonicalization and hijacking related issues it is typically preferred to use absolute links over relative links.

Reputation Management

Ensuring your brand related keywords display results which reinforce your brand. Many hate sites tend to rank highly for brand related queries.

Resubmission

Much like search engine submission, resubmission is generally a useless program which is offered by businesses bilking naive consumers out of their money for a worthless service.

Reverse Index

An index of keywords which stores records of matching documents that contain those keywords.

Referrer

Referrer is the particular web page containing a link to your web page, that made your visitor land in your web page.

Regional long tail (RLT)

A multi word keyword term which contains a city or region name. Especially useful for the service industry.

Relevance

Relevance or relevant page is the highest possibility of a given web page to be of use to a search engine user for a particular keyword search.

Render

format and stylize HTML source code into the final format for the visitor's screen. For example, text within tags will be made bold or italics.

Replica

Replica is a copy or representation of a dynamic web site or a group of web pages from a dynamic site, saved as static HTML files.

Resubmitting

The method of submitting your web page address to search engines after you've submitted the addresses. This also happens after the search engine has already included your site in its index. Search engines don't encourage resubmission as it simply clutters their queue with duplicate requests.

Robot

This is an automated program that automatically moves the Web's hypertext structure by taking a document back, and repeatedly retrieving all documents that are already referenced.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file that is used to control spiders that visit your website. This file grants access to certain folders, file types, and specific files depending on the robot accessing the site.

ROI

ROI or return on investment is the key measure to determine a site’s performance.

RSS

Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication is a method of syndicating information to a feed reader or other software which allows people to subscribe to a channel they are interested in.

Recall

The portion of relevant documents that were retrieved when compared to all relevant documents.

Reinclusion

If a site has been penalized for spamming they may fix the infraction and ask for reinclusion. Depending on the severity of the infraction and the brand strength of the site they may or may not be added to the search index.

Raw Data Feed

Raw data is information that has been collected but not formatted, analyzed or processed. This raw data can be used to build an optimized XML feed.