misc/online dictionaries

SEO Patterns of Online Dictionaries [1]

The article analyzes the SEO strategies employed by online dictionaries, highlighting their effective use of internal links, structured data, and user-generated content to enhance search visibility and traffic.

1. Online dictionaries drive significant traffic through optimized databases of words, synonyms, and example sentences.
2. They often perform well in Google’s Core Update Analyses due to their size and optimization strategies.
3. Internal linking is crucial for SEO visibility, allowing Googlebot to access important URLs and pass PageRank between entries.
4. Top dictionaries utilize various internal linking strategies, including phrases containing the searched query and linking to nearby entries.
5. Browse pages serve as effective HTML sitemaps, interlinking dictionary entries alphabetically and enhancing crawlability.
6. Different dictionaries adopt varied approaches to keyword targeting, with some using unified content pages while others create separate pages for different keyword types.
7. User-generated content can enhance SEO, as seen with Merriam-Webster's comment sections and Collins Dictionary's user-submitted entries for new words.
8. Schema markups are underutilized but can improve search performance; Merriam-Webster employs specific schemas like DefinedTermSet and DefinedTerm.
9. Effective crawl management is vital for large dictionary sites, which use robots.txt to control crawler access and XML sitemaps to organize their extensive content.
10. Key takeaways for SEO from online dictionaries include the importance of diverse internal linking, user-generated content, specific schema usage, and comprehensive XML and HTML sitemaps.