what is a proxy used for

[pasche]

Could someone explain this concept to me?  What does a proxy do for someone with a website?  Does it make search engines think your site is someone elses and then thinks that their links are from your website?  Does it cache their links to your site?  Is it blackhat?

[Terry]

Proxy is a service that fetches the web page for you. The web server regards the IP of the proxy as your IP. Thus the web server does not know your real IP.

Here is more information:
http://www.my-proxy.com/proxy-server-basics-t81.html

Some SEO tools need proxy to avoid being banned from Google. If you use one IP to fetch 1000 pages from Google, it may ban you. If you use 100 proxies to do that, Google won't ban you because every IP only get 10 pages.