Spider

A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler.

Because most Web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it. Large search engines, like Alta Vista, have many spiders working in parallel.

Splog

Short for spam blog, it's a slang term used to describe blogs that are established only to promote affiliate Web sites in order to help those sites achieve a better search engine page ranking.

Podcasting

Podcasting is similar in nature to RSS, which allows subscribers to subscribe to a set of feeds to view syndicated Web site content. With podcasting however, you have a set of subscriptions that are checked regularly for updates and instead of reading the feeds on your computer screen, you listen to the new content on on your iPod (or like device).

The format used for podcasting is RSS 2.0 with enclosures. The podcasting enclosures refer to all binary (non-text) downloads. You can read the text description of the enclosure before downloading the item to view.

Bookmark

(v) To mark a document or a specific place in a document for later retrieval. Nearly all Web browsers support a bookmarking feature that lets you save the address (URL) of a Web page so that you can easily re-visit the page at a later time.

(n) A marker or address that identifies a document or a specific place in a document.

AJAX

Short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, it is a term that describes a new approach to using a number of existing technologies together, including the following: HTML or XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, the Document Object Model, XML, XSLT, and the XMLHttpRequest object. When these technologies are combined in the Ajax model, Web applications are able to make quick, incremental updates to the user interface without reloading the entire browser page. [Source: mozilla developer center]

ATOM

Atom is the name of an XML-based Web content and metadata syndication format, and an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources belonging to periodically updated Web sites. All Atom feeds must be well-formed XML documents, and are identified with the application/atom+xml media type. [Source: AtomEnabled]

Whois

An Internet utility that returns information about a domain name or IP address. For example, if you enter a domain name such as microsoft.com, whois will return the name and address of the domain's owner (in this case, Microsoft Corporation).

Keyword Stuffing

A SEO technique used by Web designers to overload keywords onto a Web page so that search engines will read the page as being relevant in a Web search. Because search engines scan Web pages for the words that are entered into the search criteria by the user, the more times a keyword appears on the Web page the more relevancy the search engine will assign to the page in the search results (this is only one way that search engines determine relevancy, however.) Search engines often penalize a site if the engine discovers keyword stuffing, as this practice is considered poor netiquette, and some search engines will even ban the offending Web pages from their search results.

There are several methods of keyword stuffing. One way is to insert repeating keywords within the input type="hidden" field meta tag or the keyword tag so that the keywords are not seen by the user but are scanned by the search engine. Another way is to make text in the body of the Web page invisible text, or hidden text, by making the text the same color as the page’s background, rendering the text invisible to the user unless the user highlights the text. This method is called invisible keyword stuffing or .

Keyword stuffing also is referred to as keyword loading and spamdexing.

FTP

Short for File Transfer Protocol, the protocol for exchanging files over the Internet. FTP works in the same way as HTTP for transferring Web pages from a server to a user's browser and SMTP for transferring electronic mail across the Internet in that, like these technologies, FTP uses the Internet's TCP/IP protocols to enable data transfer.

FTP is most commonly used to download a file from a server using the Internet or to upload a file to a server (e.g., uploading a Web page file to a server).

IP Address

An identifier for a computer or device on a TCP/IP network. Networks using the TCP/IP protocol route messages based on the IP address of the destination. The format of an IP address is a 32-bit numeric address written as four numbers separated by periods. Each number can be zero to 255. For example, 1.160.10.240 could be an IP address.

Within an isolated network, you can assign IP addresses at random as long as each one is unique. However, connecting a private network to the Internet requires using registered IP addresses (called Internet addresses) to avoid duplicates.

The four numbers in an IP address are used in different ways to identify a particular network and a host on that network. Four regional Internet registries -- ARIN, RIPE NCC, LACNIC and APNIC -- assign Internet addresses from the following three classes.

Class A - supports 16 million hosts on each of 126 networks

Class B - supports 65,000 hosts on each of 16,000 networks

Class C - supports 254 hosts on each of 2 million networks

The number of unassigned Internet addresses is running out, so a new classless scheme called CIDR is gradually replacing the system based on classes A, B, and C and is tied to adoption of IPv6.

Also see Understanding IP Addressing in the Did You Know . . .? section of Webopedia.

Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in Web crawling by using Sitemaps to inform and direct Google search crawlers. Webmasters can place a Sitemap-formatted file on their Web server which enables Google crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly. Google Sitemaps is intended for all web site owners, from those with a single web page to companies with millions of ever-changing pages.
[Source: Adapted from Google Sitemaps FAQ]

DNS

(1) Short for Domain Name System (or Service or Server), an Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses. Because domain names are alphabetic, they're easier to remember. The Internet however, is really based on IP addresses. Every time you use a domain name, therefore, a DNS service must translate the name into the corresponding IP address. For example, the domain name www.example.com might translate to 198.105.232.4.

The DNS system is, in fact, its own network. If one DNS server doesn't know how to translate a particular domain name, it asks another one, and so on, until the correct IP address is returned.

(2) Short for digital nervous system, a term coined by Bill Gates to describe a network of personal computers that make it easier to obtain and understand information.