Rank and rent glossary
Main article: Rank and rent
This glossary defines the terms used across rankandrent.wiki.[1] Each entry cites the source its definition rests on; terms with no source are omitted. Terms that belong to the pay-per-call side of the industry (buyer, network, qualified call) are given here only as they touch this model.
A–D
[edit]- AI Mode
- A Google Search feature that, with AI Overviews, is covered by a May 2026 spam policy against manipulating AI features, as reported by AIOSEO.[2]
- AI Overviews
- Google's AI-generated answers at the top of results; Rioja reports they appear mostly on informational queries rather than on urgent local-service searches.[1]
- Area page
- A page targeting a nearby town or district for the same service; state and nationwide sites are built from many such pages, often generated programmatically.[3]
- Brandable domain
- A domain that reads as a company name rather than a keyword, used when a site will be rented to a tenant who wants it to look like their own business.[3]
- Call tracking
- Software that assigns a tracking number, attributes calls to their source and records them; CallRail markets it to small businesses from US$55 a month.[4]
- Churn
- The loss of a tenant or buyer; the concentration risk of a single-tenant site.[5]
- Citation
- A listing of a business's name, address and phone number on a directory or other site; building citations is one of Rioja's ranking steps.[1]
- CTA (call to action)
- The prompt, usually a phone number or button, that turns a visitor into an enquiry; Rioja's guide calls for content with clear calls to action.[1]
- Digital landlord
- Dooley's term for the operator of rented digital real estate; he says it came from the fact that his company is essentially renting out digital real estate.[5]
- Digital real estate
- Websites treated as rentable property; the framing behind "digital landlord".[5]
E–M
[edit]- EMD / PMD (exact or partial match domain)
- A domain containing the service and city keywords; one of the domain choices described on the domains page.[1]
- Expired domain
- A domain whose registration lapsed and which is bought for its history, links or citations; ExpiredDomains.net indexes more than 772 million such domains.[6]
- Expired domain abuse
- Google's policy against purchasing an expired domain and repurposing it primarily to manipulate rankings by hosting content that provides little or no value to users.[7]
- GBP (Google Business Profile)
- Google's map listing for a business, permitted only for a business with a real location customers can visit or that travels to customers, represented as it is in the real world.[8]
- Lead-gen site
- A website built to produce enquiries for a business; rank and rent is the form in which the publisher keeps the site.[1]
- Map pack
- The block of map results shown for local queries; Rioja says urgent local-service searches trigger map packs and call buttons.[1]
N–R
[edit]- NAP
- Name, address and phone number, which Google requires to be represented consistently in the real world for a Business Profile.[8]
- Niche
- The service category a site targets; Rioja's first step is to choose one.[1]
- Pay-per-call
- A payment model in which a publisher is paid for each inbound call that meets a buyer's rules; one of the two ways a rank-and-rent site is monetised.[9][3]
- Per-lead pricing
- Charging a tenant for each enquiry rather than a flat fee; one of the three structures Rioja describes.[1]
- Portfolio
- A publisher's set of sites; Dooley describes around 1,300.[5]
- Programmatic SEO
- Generating many pages from templates and data, used to produce area pages for state and nationwide sites.[10]
- Rent
- The recurring fee a tenant pays for a site or its leads; Local Sites Pro states typical earnings of US$50 to US$100 a month per site.[3]
- Payment as a percentage of job value; one of Rioja's three pricing structures.[1]
S–Z
[edit]- Scaled content abuse
- Google's policy against generating many pages for the primary purpose of manipulating rankings and not helping users.[7]
- Service page
- A page for one service offered on the site; part of the build Rioja describes.[1]
- Site flipping
- Selling a site as an asset; Empire Flippers lists a lead-generation category and values businesses on multiples of monthly net profit.[11]
- Site reputation abuse
- Google's policy against third-party content published on a host site mainly because of the host's established ranking signals; effective 5 May 2024.[7][12]
- Spam update
- A Google ranking update that improves detection of policy violations; Google's dashboard lists spam updates starting 24 March, 24 June and 18 August 2026.[13][14]
- Static site
- A site delivered as plain files with no database; Hugo generates such sites and Cloudflare Pages hosts them.[15][16]
- Tenant
- The local business that rents a site or its leads.[1]
- Thematic coherence
- Dynadot's term for the match between an expired domain's former identity and its new use, which it presents as the operative signal in expired domain abuse.[17]
- Tracking number
- A phone number assigned to a site so that calls can be attributed, logged and recorded.[4]
- Website rental
- Another name for the model, used by the Website Rental Coaching programme.[18]
See also
[edit]- Rank and rent – main article
- How it works
- Risks and policy
References
[edit]- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l "What is Rank and Rent? (2026 update)". Alejandro Rioja. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "Google June 2026 Spam Update: what it targeted". AIOSEO. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ a b c d "Local Sites Pro". localsites.pro. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ a b "CallRail – Call Tracking & Marketing Analytics". CallRail. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ a b c d "The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast: James Dooley with Mark Preston (transcript)". James Dooley Podcast (Transistor). Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "ExpiredDomains.net – Expired Domain Name Search Engine". ExpiredDomains.net. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ a b c "Spam policies for Google web search". Google Search Central. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ a b "Guidelines for representing your business on Google". Google Business Profile Help. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "Pay Per Call Affiliate Marketing Statistics". AffNinja. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "Local Sites Pro – Features". localsites.pro. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "Empire Flippers Marketplace". Empire Flippers. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "What web creators should know about our March 2024 core update and new spam policies". Google Search Central Blog. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "Google Search Status Dashboard – Ranking updates history". Google. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "What is a Google Spam Update?". PI Datametrics. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "Hugo – The world's fastest framework for building websites". gohugo.io. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "Cloudflare Pages – Build & deploy frontend sites". Cloudflare. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "Expired domains and the 2026 Google spam update". Dynadot. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
- ^ "Website Rental Coaching". websiterentalcoaching.com. Retrieved 11 September 2026.