Anchor text

The visible, clickable words of a hyperlink.

Articles for Creation (AfC)

Wikipedia’s review queue, where a draft is assessed by an independent volunteer before it can go live in the main encyclopedia.

Community guidelines strike

A recorded policy violation against an account, which accumulates and progressively limits what the account can do.

De-indexing

also: Delisting, Search removal

Removing a URL from a search engine’s results so it no longer appears for a given query, without deleting the page itself.

DMCA takedown

A copyright notice under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act requiring a host or search engine to remove infringing material.

Dofollow link

A link that passes ranking signals to its destination, as opposed to a nofollow or sponsored link, which tells search engines not to.

Domain Rating (DR)

also: DR, Domain Authority, DA

A 0–100 score estimating how strong a website’s backlink profile is, published by Ahrefs; Moz’s equivalent is Domain Authority.

Editorial coverage

An article a publication chose to write, with no payment involved — the opposite of a paid placement, however similar the two can look.

Escrow

An arrangement where payment is held and released only once agreed conditions are met.

Global rank

also: Alexa rank, Similarweb rank

A website’s position in a ranking of all sites by traffic — commonly Similarweb rank now that Alexa has been discontinued.

Google Knowledge Panel

The information box that appears beside Google results for a recognised person, company or thing, assembled from Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Google News indexing

Whether a publication’s articles are eligible to appear in Google News and the news carousel in search results.

Legacy verification

also: Legacy blue tick, Notability badge

The original verification badge granted on the basis of notability and authenticity rather than a subscription — still visible on accounts that earned it.

Meta Verified

A paid monthly subscription from Meta that adds a blue badge, impersonation monitoring and support, available to buy directly in the Instagram or Facebook app.

Monthly traffic

An estimate of how many visits a website receives per month, usually from Similarweb or Ahrefs rather than the publisher’s own analytics.

Notability (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia’s standard for whether a subject deserves an article: significant coverage in multiple reliable, independent, secondary sources.

OG username

also: Rare handle, Short handle

A short, early or dictionary-word username — typically one to four characters, a first name, or a common noun.

Paid editing disclosure

also: WP:PAID

A Wikimedia Terms of Use requirement that anyone compensated for edits discloses their employer, client and affiliation.

Proof of delivery

Evidence that an agreed outcome was achieved — a live URL, a timestamped screenshot, a before-and-after of a search page, a visible badge.

Right to be forgotten

also: RTBF, Right to erasure

A right under EU and UK data protection law to have search results about you delisted when the information is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive.

SERP

The search engine results page: what a person sees after typing a query.

Shadowban

also: Reach restriction, Distribution limit

An informal term for reduced distribution: an account’s content stops being recommended to people who do not already follow it, without any notification.

Sponsored label

also: Paid post, Partner content, Advertorial

A visible disclosure on an article saying it was paid for — shown as "Sponsored", "Paid post", "Partner content" or similar.

Syndication

Republication of an article across a network of other sites, common with newswires.

VFCore Score

A 0–100 score and letter grade combining an outlet’s authority, reach, link value, discoverability, label transparency and operational reliability.

Wikidata

A free, structured, machine-readable database run by the Wikimedia Foundation; each entry has a Q-number such as Q42.