Canonical Tag

An HTML hint (rel="canonical") placed in a page's head section that tells search engines which URL should be treated as the primary version. Canonical tags prevent duplicate content from splitting your ranking signals across multiple URLs.

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Related Terms

Cached Page

A snapshot of a web page stored by a search engine from its most recent crawl. Checking the cached version lets you verify what Google actually sees — helpful for diagnosing indexing issues or cloaking problems.

Canonical URL

The single URL that search engines recognize as the authoritative version of a page when similar or identical content appears at multiple addresses. Setting the correct canonical URL consolidates link equity and avoids index bloat.

Cloaking

Serving one version of a page to search engine crawlers and a different version to human visitors. Cloaking is a clear violation of Google's guidelines and can result in a manual penalty or complete removal from the index.

Co-citation

When two pages are repeatedly mentioned or linked together by unrelated third-party sources. Search engines may infer a topical relationship between co-cited pages even if they never link to each other directly.

Co-occurrence

The pattern of certain words or phrases appearing together across many documents about the same subject. Search engines use co-occurrence data to understand semantic relationships between terms and topics.

Computer-Generated Content

Text produced entirely by algorithms or AI models. Google evaluates all content by the same quality standards regardless of authorship, so computer-generated pages need genuine depth and accuracy to rank.