By: Scottie Claiborne | Source: isedb.com

Some of the advice floating around regarding linking for your site can be pretty confusing, especially when it comes to reciprocal linking. Is it something you have to do? Can your site succeed without reciprocal links? Will you be penalized for reciprocal linking? There are so many conflicting theories…let’s try to clear the subject up a little.

Link Popularity

The founders of Google worked off a premise that has been active in academic papers for years: citation authority. They found that the more academic papers cited another’s work, the more likely that cited work was to be an authority on the subject. Similarly, when a lot of sites link to one site, it’s likely that site is an authority for the topic. The "topic" is whatever those links say it is…if 25 sites link to another site with the term "oak shelving," it’s likely that page is an important page for oak shelving.

Manipulation of Links

It didn’t take long for people who wanted to rank well for certain terms to figure out that they needed a lot of links with their chosen keyword phrases to improve their rankings in the search engines. Many schemes were born, including mini-sites, site networks, link farms, and reciprocal linking.

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By: David A. Utter  |Source: webpronews.com

The search advertising company turned eight years old, and also dropped updates into its Calendar and Transit products.

Should we talk about the weather? Why not? Google updated its Calendar with a new feature that Michael Bolin, Google Calendar Engineer, referred to as ‘web content events’:

Our latest feature, web content events, makes it easier to distinguish between what you’ve scheduled for yourself and other things going on around you. A web content event appears as an icon at the top of the day - you can either mouse over that to get a quick summary, or click it to bring up a web page with more information.

You can add web content events to your own calendar for weather forecasts, moon phases, and even Google doodles (those special-occasion logos you sometimes see on Google.com). Now you can be the first to know when there’s a new one!

Should we talk about the government? How about transit instead, as in Google Transit? That’s the service Google launched with Portland, Oregon as its test base.

Chris Harrelson, Software engineer & Transit team tech lead, drove the news to the Google blog about the latest updates to Transit. It’s up to a whopping six cities now!

Today, we’re thrilled to tell you that we’ve added five more cities to our coverage:

Eugene, Oregon
Honolulu, Hawaii
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Seattle, Washington
Tampa, Florida

Now riders in these cities (and Portland, of course) can use Google to plan trips using public transportation, and in some cities, compare the cost of public transportation with the cost of driving. You can also specify when you want to leave or arrive, and see different route possibilities

More cities will be arriving on Transit in the coming weeks and months, Harrelson wrote.

It’s another year gone by for Google, and they have a new image designed by webmaster and chief doodler Dennis Hwang that millions of Google users have probably seen today.

Spread the word: bookmark it/ readit

By: Jason OConnor | Source: sitepronews.com

One of the biggest reasons people visit websites is to get information. If you can regularly provide fresh, quality content on your website you can expect to be rewarded by visitors and return visitors. What’s more, you will be rewarded by the search engines. I recommend that you add new and original content to your site as often as possible, ideally once a day.

Regularly adding fresh and original content:

• Keeps your site visitors coming back
• Continually adds value to your website
• Makes people more comfortable buying from your site
• Establishes yourself as an authority in your industry
• Greatly helps your site rank higher in search engines

All of the above factors translate into revenue.

We all know how hard adding original and fresh content is, especially if you’re the business owner. You have to be original, creative, organized, thoughtful and motivated, and above all, able to write. So what’s a website owner or business owner supposed to do? RSS may be the answer.

What Is RSS?

Here’s the Wikipedia definition of RSS:

RSS is a family of web feed formats specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats) and used for Web syndication. RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel". These RSS feeds provide a way for users to passively receive newly released content (such as text, web pages, sound files, or other media); this might be the full content itself or just a link to it, possibly with a summary or other metadata (data describing the content).

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