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 all 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. In this system, a webpage's importance (based on a scale of 1 to 10) is computed by working out how many 'back links' (websites linking to a page) there are and the importance of each of these links. If a lot of important sites link to a site then it is regarded as important. So, in order to boost your importance to search engines, you need to get as many sites that are similar to yours to link to you and also have a fairly small amount of links going out from your site. Quality of links is however more important than quantity.

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

Spamdexing - Black hat techniques employed by some web marketers and site designers in order to fool a search engine's spider and indexing programs. The objective is to ensure that their website 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. For the latest Australian spam laws, click here.

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 summarizes the content and adds the links to their indexes.

White Hat - Search engine approved Search Engine Optimisation techniques.