Another name for the highly risky search engine optimization technique known as doorway pages. This is one of the more common causes of the Google Death Penalty. Sometimes confused with landing pages.

Also seen as "geotagging." The practice of adding geographic information to various media such as websites, photos, RSS feeds and videos. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though it can also include altitude, bearing, and place names. Geo-tagging is useful for finding various location-specific information using a geo-tagging enabled search engine, such as images taken at a given location, local news, websites, and more.

The advertising method of determining a physical location (geolocation) of a visitor and subsequently delivering content to that visitor that is related to his/her location. This can be based on a visitor's state, county, region, zip code, IP Address, or other information.

Now often called “widgets” (by mistake, I think, as “widgets” tend to be more under-the-hood type things), gizmos were useful mini-apps or functions used to spiff up otherwise boring pages. Hit counters are gizmos. Event countdown calendars are gizmos. Any Javascript whizbang plug-in for a page is a gizmo.

The most popular search engine on the web. Google began in January 1996, as a research project by Larry Page, who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. The company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 4, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. Today, Google attracts at least 135 million U.S. visitors every month.

Google's rebranding of the web analytics tool Urchin, which Google purchased in March 2005. Google Analytics is currently a free service that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. Google Analytics' approach is to show high level dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. The tool allows the user to pinpoint pages that are not performing through funner visualization, referrers, and custom visitor segmentation.

Initially, this number indicated links to an individual page that Google considered particularly valuable, as shown by the link: command. Currently, it represents a subset of the total links coming to a site. It is not believed that the number of BackLinks that Google currently shows reflects the actual number that it uses in its relevancy calculations.

A Google bomb (or Googlebomb) is an attempt to influence the ranking of a given site in results returned by the Google search engine through the use of external linking. The most famous (or infamous) Google bomb is miserable failure. Update: In late January 2007, Google took steps to remove Google bombs from its index.

Or Googlebot, uses several user-agents to crawl and index content in Google.com. The term Googlebot describes all Google spiders. All Google bots begin with "Googlebot"; for instance, Googlebot-Image:crawls pages for Google's image index.

A term for attempts to damage a competitor's website. It is based on the belief that Google will penalize a website that has gained links too quickly. By this theory, if one finds a way to point a large number of low quality links to a competitor's site, Google will consider the site as engaging in SEO spam and will lower the site's rankings. While a number of individuals have stated they have seen proof of the effects of Google Bowling, no one has published any actual proof (other than "proof by assertion"). Even those who do believe in Google Bowling believe it works in very specific situations. Google has stated that there is no way for a person to affect the rating of a competitor's website, although there are some indications that they have softened this stance. At worst, Google bowling is likely to affect only brand new sites with little to no previously existing links.

The website directory offered by Google. Google Directory is powered by the Open Directory Project.

Google Docs is a suite of software applications that allow users to create, edit and share documents, spreadsheets and slideshow presentations. The documents are stored online on a server hosted by Google and are accessible via any internet connection. Users can access their documents by logging into their Google account.

An addition to Google Trends. Hot Trends displays the top 100 hot searches of the past hour. It provides 24-hour search volume graph as well as blog, news and web search results. Topics often include current news, events and pop culture references. Hot Trends also has a history feature for those wishing to browse past hot searches.

The benefit provided to one's search engine rankings from links, particularly within Google.

An addition to Google's user interface that gives a user more control. It allows one to edit and personalize search results. Users can reorder, delete, add, or annotate search results for any query. When logged in to Google, it saves the changes enabling repeat searches to be customized. Google emphasizes that SearchWiki will not impact page ranking at this time.