SEO Glossary

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UCE
Acronym for Unsolicited Commercial Email, informally known as spam.

Unethical SEO
The use of discouraged search engine optimization techniques, in contrast to ethical SEO. Such practices include keyword stuffing and spamdexing. What exactly constitutes ethical or unethical SEO is highly debatable, as search engines do not publish details of their ranking algorithms.

Unique user
An individual website visitor. It can be a first-time visitor, or a single visitor as distinguished from other visitors over a given time frame.

Unix
A multitasking, time-sharing operating system, believed by many to be the One True Operating System. Unix was inspired by the Multics operating system, and the Unix name is actually a play on Multics. Unix was developed in AT&T Bell Labs in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. The name Unix can also refer to a class of operating systems that are based on the original Unix system; many hardware vendors, including IBM and Sun Microsystems, have their own proprietary “flavors” of Unix. Linux can also be considered a Unix.

Upload
To send data to a host or client, from the point of view of the sender. From the point of view of the receiver, the term download is used.

URI
Acronym for Uniform Resource Indicator.

URL
Acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. The URL is the standard naming scheme of the World Wide Web, used to identify webpages, websites, and webpage content such as images, video clips, or sound clips. Full URLs contain the type of protocol used to access the URL. For example, the URL http://slashdot.org indicates that it is a website that connects via HTTP. The URL ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/pub/quake3/linuxq3apoint.tar.gz indicates an FTP URL. In the context of search engine optimization, search engines analyze URLs to determine if a website's name itself is appropriate for its content, and this may or may not affect search engine rankings.

URL Submission
See submission, above.

User Agent
The software that a user uses to send requests to webservers and receive data from them, such as a web browser. These programs identify themselves to websites with a user agent name, and websites may or may not react differently to different user agents. For example, it is possible for a website to be discriminatory and refuse to send its content to users of a particular web browser. Search engine spiders also identify themselves as user agents, and the robots.txt file can be used to influence search engine spiders selectively.

User session
See session, above.

UTC
Acronym for Universal Time Coordinated.

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