Web Terms Explained

Backlinks - Incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of popularity or importance of a website or page.

Bandwidth - The amount of data that can be passed along a communications channel in a given period of time.

Black Hat - Search Engine Optimisation techniques that Search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimise.

Link Farms - A group of web pages that hyperlink to every other page in the group. Although some link farms can be created by hand, most are created through automated programs and services. A link farm is a form of spamming the index of a search engine.

PageRank - The name of Google's Page ranking system.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Designing a website to that search engines easily find the pages and index them.

Spamdexing - Techniques employed by some Web marketers and site designers to fool a search engine's spider and indexing programs. The objective is to ensure their Web site always appears at or near the top of the list of search engine results.

Spamming - Unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail.

Web Crawler - Also known as a 'spider', 'ant', 'robot' (bot) and 'intelligent agent', a crawler is a program that searches for information on the Web. Crawlers are widely used by Web search engines to index all the pages on a site by following the links from page to page. The search engine then summarises the content and adds the links to their indexes.

White Hat - Search Engine approved Search Engine Optimisation Techniques