A shortened version of the term Google BackLinks. Sometimes used to refer to any link coming into a page.

The major search engine in China that provides over 740 million webpages, and is the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index.

1) Any Web document or site that pretends to be one thing in search results but turns out to be something else when a user clicks through to it. 2) A strategy for building traffic to a Web site. 3) The practice of changing the content, relevance, or connections of a Web document or tool, gimzo , or widget after it has become popular.

Also considered delisting. In a response to being spammed, a search engine will impose this penalty on a website. It can be an IP address or a specific URL.

An advertisement that appears in the form of a graphic image on a web page. Banner ads usually conform to standard sizes on a web page and can be animated.

Symbiotic advertising relationship involving businesses that promote one another's websites on an exchange rather than a paid basis. Also known as link exchange.

A term used to describe the technique that online publishers use to increase a campaign's effectiveness. Information on a user's search patterns and web-browsing behavior is collected. This data can be used alone or coupled with other forms of targeting such as demographics.

A controversial and difficult to define concept in search engine optimization that ascertains that certain techniques are actually unethical. Black hat includes techniques such as cloaking, doorway pages, and invisible text. While such techniques are contrary to search engine guidelines, are certainly risky, and may cause one to receive the Google Death Penalty, it does not become a moral issue unless a company is not appraised of the risks of such techniques. At the extreme, some consider black hat to be anything other than basic content creation. The opposite of black hat is white hat.

Short for web log, a blog is a site (or a subsection of a site) that allows individual to publish musings and opinions on particular topics. Generally, readers can comment on the published posts. Properly implemented and maintained, blogs are useful both for generating traffic and build links to a site for SEO purposes, but are subject to attacks such as blog comment spam.

A type of spam that consists of comment postings made to blogs for the sole purpose of acquiring a link to the spammers site. Such comments rarely have any real content and are automatically detected and blocked by many blogs. Google's NoFollow was created at least partly as a way to curtail blog comment spam. In this goal, NoFollow has largely failed.

A group of blogs operated by a single person or group that are populated by software, usually RSS-feed scraping scripts. Used for link building, blog farms are created by special software that installs popular blogging software on multiple domains and hosting accounts. Sometimes confused with links farms .

A blogging platform that is owned by Google that allows users to create and update blogs. Blogger.com is a free service. Users can publish on the Blogspot.com domain or FTP content to another domain. Though Blogger is user-friendly, it lacks features that other blogging platforms have.

The all encompassing world of blogs, bloggers and blog postings. The blogosphere is a rapidly growing and evolving aspect of the Internet.

A linked list of blogs that are recommended by the blogger. They appear on a blog site, usually in the sidebar.

A search engine for forums and message boards that allows correspondences with multiple boards simultaneously.