SEO glossary entries for ‘M’

manual actions: Are instances where a human Google reviewer has decided that pages on a site are not compliant with Google’s ‘webmaster quality guidelines’. Flagged sites may be demoted or removed entirely from Google’s search results. The Manual Actions page in ‘Webmaster Tools’ lists known problems with your site and suggestions about how to address the issues involved. If your site’s ranking is affected by a manual spam action, Google will also notify the site owner by email and in the Webmaster Tools message center.
Manual Bid Management: Managing bids for keyword associated adverts without using specialised software for the purpose.
Mashup: The combination, visualization, and aggregation of data and functionality from multiple websites, web applications and web services, to produce a new and different service.
Masked Domain: See ‘Cloaked Domain’ and ‘Domain Cloaking’.
Media RSS: An RSS feed that lists media files along with specially formatted metadata about those files.
Merchant Review: A customer-authored online review of a merchant, typically published on a 3rd party site.
Meta Description Tag: See ‘Description Meta Tag’.
Meta Keyword Tag: See ‘Keyword Meta Tag’.
Meta Search Engine: A search engine that displays results from many different search engines.
Microblog: A blog made up of lots of very short posts, often from mobile devices. The micro blog might be a standalone website, the pages on a Twitter account or similar, or just a sidebar of micro-postings alongside the main content of a normal blog.
Microblogging: The process of creating very short blog posts, typically less than 200 characters. Microblog posts are often created on, and posted from mobile devices. Twitter is a popular microblogging service.
Mirroring: See ‘Site Mirroring’.
Mobile Friendly: See ‘Mobile Friendly algorithm’
Mobile Friendly algorithm: Is the set of rules which Google uses to reward mobile-friendly pages and raise their profile for mobile searchers. It is a component of Google’s overall ranking algorithm, known as ‘Hummingbird’.
Mobile Friendly update: See ‘Mobile Friendly algorithm’
Mobile Search: Web search tools designed for mobile devices.
Monitored Directories: A monitored directory is a humanly edited and maintained ‘Web Directory’.
MozRank: Is a logarithmic-scale metric promoted by SEOMoz. It is supposed to measure the importance of a web page based on the number and quality of other pages that link to them. Unsurprisingly, higher quality incoming links enhance MozRank. Quality appears to be measured by the popularity of the link source.
MozRank Passed: Is an SEOMOz metric for the amount of link juice (ranking power) that a specific, individual, link passes to its target. It involves dividing the amount of ‘MozRank’ on the source page by the total number of links on that source same page, taking into account duplicate links, link dampening, etc.
MozTrust: Is SEOMoz's metric for how trustworthy an inbound link is. It is supposed to measure the link “distance” between a link-giving page and a ‘seeded trust source’. SEOMoz suggest we think of it like six degrees of separation, i.e. a direct link from trusted source itself is worth more than a page which itself receives a direct link from the same trusted source.
MRSS: See ‘Media RSS’.