301 Redirect
A permanent server-side redirect from one URL to another that passes 90-99% of link equity and ranking power. The proper way to handle moved pages, deleted content, and URL changes without losing SEO value.
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Glossary Category
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the practice of ensuring your site's infrastructure supports discovery and understanding by search engines and AI systems. It covers crawlability, indexing, rendering, structured data, URL design, redirects, and performance,so that both traditional search and generative engines can reliably find, parse, and trust your content before ranking or citing it.
What you'll learn
- How crawlability and indexing impact visibility
- How structured markup improves machine readability
- How rendering and performance affect AI retrieval
- How URL structure and redirects influence ranking stability
- How to maintain scalable technical architecture
The Foundation Layer of Search
Technical SEO forms the foundation of search visibility. Without proper crawl access, indexing, and structured clarity, neither traditional search engines nor AI systems can retrieve or interpret your content effectively. It enables every other SEO and GEO layer to function.
Terms in this cluster (38)
404 Error
HTTP status code indicating a requested page doesn't exist. Occurs when users click broken links, enter wrong URLs, or visit deleted pages. Excessive 404 errors harm user experience and can waste crawl budget on large sites.
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Accessibility (Web Accessibility)
Designing and developing websites so people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with content. Includes screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation, color contrast, and alternative text for images.
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AI Crawler Robots.txt Management
Configuring robots.txt files to control which AI crawlers can access your content for training purposes. Different from traditional SEO robots.txt - manages access for GPTBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, and other AI-specific crawlers.
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Answer Synthesis Priority
Answer Synthesis Priority refers to how AI systems prioritize retrieved passages during the final answer construction phase, determining which sources shape the core narrative of a response.
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Authority Weighting
Authority Weighting describes how AI systems assign greater importance to sources with strong credibility, backlinks, entity recognition, and historical reliability when ranking retrieved passages.
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Breadcrumbs
A navigation aid showing users their current location in the site hierarchy through a clickable path (Home > Category > Subcategory > Page). Improves user experience and provides search engines with clear site structure signals.
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Canonical URL
The preferred version of a web page when multiple URLs contain identical or very similar content. Specified using the canonical tag (rel='canonical') to prevent duplicate content issues and consolidate ranking signals.
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Context Window Optimization
Context Window Optimization ensures retrieved content fits efficiently within an LLM’s token limit while preserving semantic completeness. It balances chunk size, relevance, and answer coverage.
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Core Web Vitals
A set of specific factors Google considers important for user experience: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Part of Google's page experience ranking signals.
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Crawl Budget Optimization
Managing how search engine crawlers allocate their crawling resources across your site. Critical for large websites (100K+ pages) to ensure important pages get crawled regularly while low-value pages don't waste crawl capacity.
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Duplicate Content
Duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content that appear across multiple URLs-either within the same domain or across different websites-creating ambiguity for search engines about which version to index and rank. Exact and near-exact duplication splits ranking signals across URL variants, potentially suppressing all versions. AI retrieval systems similarly struggle with duplicate content, often defaulting to the most authoritative domain hosting the content.
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Embedding Alignment
Embedding Alignment refers to structuring content so that its semantic meaning closely matches how embedding models represent similar queries. Proper alignment increases retrieval accuracy in vector-based systems.
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Entity SEO
Entity SEO is the practice of optimizing content so search engines and AI systems can recognize and understand entities like brands, products, and people.
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FAQPage Schema
FAQPage schema is a Schema.org structured data type that marks up question-and-answer content in a machine-readable format, enabling search engines and AI systems to directly extract and display FAQ pairs. It is one of the most impactful schema types for AI visibility, as it directly packages content in the Q&A format preferred by AI answer engine retrieval.
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HowTo Schema
HowTo schema is a Schema.org structured data type that marks up step-by-step instructional content, defining each step's name, text, image, and sequence in a machine-readable format. It enables AI systems to extract and present procedural content accurately, making how-to content highly retrievable for task-oriented AI queries. HowTo schema is particularly effective for capturing 'how do I' prompt traffic.
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HTTPS/SSL Certificate
Secure protocol (HTTPS) that encrypts data between user browsers and websites using SSL/TLS certificates. A confirmed Google ranking signal since 2014 and required for modern web standards, trust, and security.
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Image Sitemap
An XML sitemap specifically for images on your website, helping search engines discover and index images that might not be found through normal crawling. Particularly important for image-heavy sites and Google Images optimization.
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Index Bloat
Index bloat is the condition where a website has a disproportionately large number of low-quality, thin, or duplicate URLs indexed by search engines relative to genuinely valuable pages-diluting crawl budget, spreading link equity thinly, and potentially triggering quality penalties. Common causes include faceted navigation generating millions of parameter URLs, auto-generated tag and category pages, session IDs, printer-friendly versions, and thin paginated pages.
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JavaScript SEO
Optimizing JavaScript-heavy websites to ensure search engines can crawl, render, and index content properly. Critical for single-page applications (SPAs) and sites built with React, Vue, Angular, or Next.js frameworks.
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JSON-LD Optimization
JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) optimization is the practice of implementing and refining JSON-LD structured data markup to accurately describe content entities, relationships, and attributes in a machine-readable format. JSON-LD is the preferred schema implementation method recommended by Google and widely parsed by AI retrieval systems to understand content structure and context.
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Log File Analysis
Examining server log files to understand how search engine crawlers interact with your website. Reveals crawl patterns, errors, resource consumption, and indexing issues invisible in standard analytics tools.
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Mobile-First Indexing
Google's practice of predominantly using the mobile version of a website's content for indexing and ranking. Reflects the shift to mobile-majority internet usage where Google crawls and indexes mobile pages first.
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Page Speed
How quickly a web page loads and becomes interactive for users. A confirmed Google ranking factor and critical component of user experience, especially on mobile devices.
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Passage Ranking
Passage ranking is Google's capability to index and rank individual passages within a webpage independently of the overall page topic, enabling specific sections of broad or long-form pages to surface for highly specific queries. A page about general marketing could have its specific section on email subject lines rank independently for email-focused queries. AI retrieval systems use fundamentally similar passage-level selection logic when extracting content for citations.
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RAG Chunking Strategy
RAG chunking strategy refers to how content is segmented into discrete passages for indexing and retrieval in Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. Chunk size, overlap, and semantic coherence determine whether a passage is retrieved and cited. Optimal chunking balances completeness with specificity, ensuring each chunk answers a single coherent question or topic.
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Responsive Design
Web design approach where websites automatically adapt layout, images, and content to fit any screen size (desktop, tablet, mobile). Google's recommended configuration for mobile-friendliness and critical for mobile-first indexing.
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Retrieval Depth
Retrieval Depth refers to how far down an AI system searches within its candidate results before selecting passages for answer synthesis. Greater depth increases the likelihood of secondary sources being included in generative outputs.
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Retrieval Recall
Retrieval Recall measures how effectively an AI system retrieves all relevant content from its index. High recall indicates that important passages are not missed during the retrieval phase of AI answer generation.
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Robots.txt
A text file placed in the root directory of a website that instructs search engine crawlers which pages or sections to crawl or not crawl. A fundamental tool for managing crawl budget and controlling search engine access.
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Schema Types
Different categories of structured data markup from Schema.org vocabulary including Article, Product, Organization, LocalBusiness, Recipe, FAQ, HowTo, Event, and 800+ other types. Each type has specific properties for describing different content.
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Semantic Relevance Scoring
Semantic Relevance Scoring measures how closely content matches the contextual meaning of a query rather than its exact keywords.
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Source Selection Probability
Source Selection Probability estimates the likelihood that a generative engine selects a specific source when generating answers for a query.
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Thin Content
Thin content refers to web pages with little or no added value for users-typically pages with minimal original text, auto-generated content, scraped content, doorway pages, or affiliate pages with no supplementary information. Google's quality systems actively identify and demote thin content, and AI retrieval systems bypass it in favor of pages with substantive, original information. Thin content is one of the primary causes of ranking suppression and AI citation exclusion.
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URL Structure Optimization
URL structure optimization is the practice of designing clean, logical, and descriptive URL patterns that communicate page content to both search engines and users, support efficient crawling, and distribute link equity appropriately. Well-structured URLs use relevant keywords, meaningful directory hierarchies, hyphens as word separators, and avoid unnecessary parameters, session IDs, or dynamic strings. URL clarity is a minor but consistent search ranking signal and significantly impacts user trust and click-through rates.
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Vector Embeddings
Vector embeddings are numerical representations of text (or other content) in high-dimensional space, where semantic similarity corresponds to spatial proximity. AI retrieval systems encode both queries and documents as vectors, enabling semantic search that matches meaning rather than keywords. Embedding quality determines how accurately AI systems find relevant content for any given query.
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Vector Index Optimization
Vector Index Optimization focuses on structuring embeddings and metadata to improve retrieval speed, accuracy, and semantic matching within AI systems that rely on vector databases.
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XML Sitemap
A file that lists all important URLs on a website in a structured XML format, helping search engines discover and crawl pages more efficiently. Acts as a roadmap of your website's content for search engine crawlers.
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Strengthen Your Technical Signals
Understand how technical SEO impacts your visibility and AI citation performance.