By Trevor Zion Bauknight

The Mozilla folks, with apologies to the Monty Python gang, aren’t quite dead yet. They feel happy. They think they’ll go for a walk.

What they’ve done is take advantage of the frustration many people (particularly Windows users) are feeling with the condition of their web browsing experience by releasing Firefox 1.0, a lightweight new browser based on years of redevelopment since Netscape’s open-sourcing of Communicator in 1998.

By Neil Payne

Reciprocal linking is of great importance to website owners who wish to achieve good rankings on the major search engines. As a result the internet has witnessed a growth in ‘link’ sites where webmasters can find potential reciprocal link partners. In addition, webmasters are trawling the internet looking for link partners that can benefit their site either through complementary content or high page rankings.

However, as many webmasters can appreciate, when corresponding with fellow webmasters to reciprocate links it can be a very trying process. E-mails are not replied to, links are never added, your links suddenly move or disappear without notice or the proper link details are not used. Such actions lead to wasted time and frustration.

There is perhaps no more level playing field in business than the Internet. It is this fact that has created millionaires from paupers. The amount of monëy that can be made depends of course on your industry and your products and/or services but to be sure, if it can be sold at all, it can be sold online.

Rumorville, conspiracy theory, and over speculation results in crazed forum discussion and a possible slashdot mentioning. Jason Dowdell, someone I have spoken with often for about a year now, published a blog entry named Microsoft Crawling Google Results For New Search Engine?, which caused major forum craze. Jason’s blog entry was republished at WebProNews and also reprinted in the WebProWorld forum. I decided to hold off on mentioning it until hearing more from MSN and some of the other experts in the field.

By Mike Banks Valentine (c) Oct. 26, 2004

Google market value has topped $50B, so currently they’re worth more in dollar value than Yahoo. That goes right in line with being worth more in search value and relevance. (CBS MarketWatch)

I’ve written before that Yahoo has their fingers in so many pies that they don’t have the necessary attention on search that Google does. Google only buys companies that offer services, software and add-ons which increase the value of the Google search experience.

Google has announced the launch of some new AdWords tools designed to assist webmasters and search engine marketers in creating successful ad campaigns. The program, called Google Advertising Professionals, was “designed for professionals who currently manage or want to manage multiple AdWords client accounts, the Google Advertising Professionals program can help you become a more successful ad manager - for free.”

Google has introduced a number of new AdWords features designed to help fledgling advertisers. Share your thoughts on these new features along with anything else AdWords related at WebProWorld.

By Richard Zwicky

A few weeks ago I was involved in a very strange conversation with some pretty bright people. One publishes a widely circulated industry magazine, another was an industry consultant, and the last was the CEO of a major corporation in the same industry. I’m not sure how the conversation evolved, but towards the end the consultant mentioned that another journal had done an excellent job syndicating their content through blogs and RSS feeds. The comment was quite unremarkable in and of itself. What happened next was not.
“What is an RSS feed?” asked the publisher; “I keep hearing the term ‘blogs’ and ‘blogging’ but have not paid much attention to them, what is a blog?” asked the CEO. A deep moment of silence ensued, it was broken by the consultant’s almost sardonic voice “Jeez man, an RSS feed means Really Simple Syndication you should know all about it, it is core to your business.” The CEO got off a bit easier.

By Phil Craven

A wander around the various search engine optimization forums reveals that people are divided into two groups as to how search engines rank web pages. One group insists that “content is king”, and the other insists that “link text is king”. The ‘content’ group recommend adding good quality, on-topic, optimized, content pages to the site and the rankings will come. The ‘link text’ group recommend adding links to pages, with the targeted search terms in the link text, and the rankings will come.
So which group is right?

I was questioned today by a developer who was watching a particular IP address scan his site. The IP was 65.54.188.86 and is registered to Microsoft Corp. located at One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052. This visitor was not sending the normal header information associated with a crawler to the web server such as an http robot name or identifying info or even a browser name.

Is Microsoft “using” Google’s search results to populate their index? Discuss Microsoft’s behavior at WebProWorld.

According to conventional SEO wisdom, link building is the key to a successful search engine ranking. The rationale is simple; with more links pointing to your site, your site has a better chance of getting noticed by search engines as they crawl the web populating their index. Because search engines are thought to value links, site owners have been scrambling to acquire links pointing to their web presence. However, has this mad dash to acquire links also damaged the importance of links as an indicator of relevance? Or has it damaged the quality of Internet content has whole? Some think both scenarios have occurred.