SEO Glossary - AI Glossary - Terms & Definitions Simplified
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NAP (Name, Address, Phone)
NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number.
NAP Consistency
NAP consistency is the absolute uniformity of a business's Name, Address, and Phone number across every single mention of the business on the internet.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the highly complex subfield of artificial intelligence that focuses on enabling computers to read, understand, interpret, and generate human language with semantic nuance, rather than just processing raw code or exact-match keywords.
Natural Link
A natural link (or organic link) is an inbound hyperlink that a webmaster or journalist places on their website entirely of their own volition, without any outreach, negotiation, or financial compensation from the target site.
Navigational Keyword
A navigational keyword is a search query used by someone whose explicit intent is to find a specific website, brand, or physical location, rather than researching a topic or shopping for a product.
Near Me Searches
Near me searches are hyper-local queries where a user explicitly appends the phrase "near me" or "nearby" to their search term (e.g., "coffee shop near me" or "auto repair nearby").
Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are specific search terms that advertisers explicitly instruct Google Ads to exclude from triggering their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Negative SEO
Negative SEO is a malicious, black-hat tactic where a competitor intentionally attempts to sabotage your website's search engine rankings by pointing thousands of toxic, spammy backlinks at your domain, scraping and duplicating your content, or hacking your site to alter its robots.txt file.
Neural Matching
Neural Matching, introduced by Google in 2018, is an AI-driven algorithmic system designed specifically to understand the underlying concepts behind a search query, rather than just matching the exact words.
Neural Network
A Neural Network is the foundational, highly complex computational architecture that powers deep learning and Large Language Models (LLMs), designed to mimic the interconnected structure of neurons in the human brain.
News Carousel
A News Carousel (often referred to as Top Stories) is a dynamic, horizontally scrollable block of breaking news articles, opinion pieces, and live updates that appears at the absolute top of the SERP for highly trending, newsworthy, or volatile search queries.
Nofollow Link
A nofollow link is a hyperlink containing the HTML attribute `rel="nofollow"`, which explicitly instructs search engine crawlers not to pass any link equity (PageRank) or algorithmic authority to the target URL.
Noindex Tag
A noindex tag is an HTML directive that explicitly tells search engine crawlers not to include a specific webpage in their search index.
Non-Branded Keyword
A non-branded keyword is a search query that does not include a specific company name, product trademark, or proprietary brand term.