TNX.net - Online Text Link Advertising Platform
TNX.net is an online text link advertising platform that’s offers website publishers the opportunity to monetize their websites by placing text links ads on them while at the same time offering a huge marketplace for advertises who wish to place links on TNX.net member sites in order to improve their ranks in search engines and improve traffic to their pages.
Registering for TNX.net is a quick, simple process and registering right now has many bonus benefits as seen here on the digitalpoint forum. Publisher and Advertiser registrations are incorporated into one easy process so once you register for TNX.net you get both advertiser and publisher privileges as seen in the sidebar of all user pages after registering and logging in.
Google Custom Search - Create your own Search Engine
Google custom search is a tool that allows website owners to create custom search engines which allow users to search through the content of their webpages. Google custom search is very similar to Yahoo Search Builder and Live Search Box but is easily the most popular due to Google’s dominance in the internet search market.
Customizable Search and Editions
Google custom search allows users to customize which sites or individual webpages are searched, the branding and even the colours of results to match the look and feel of your existing website. The standard edition generates an advertisement supported search engine while for a fee a business edition allows users to remove the advertisements on search result pages. Government agencies, universities, schools and non-profit enterprises are allowed to use the business edition for free.
Configuring Google Custom Search
Setting up Google up a custom search engine is as easy as signing up for a Google account if you don’t already have one and following a simple two step process for naming and customizing your engine. All custom search engines created are saved to your Google account and can be tracked and modified easily when ready.
Be sure to visit the Google Custom Search Blog for the lasts tips, news and updates directly from the Google custom search team.
Alpha Version of Wikia Search goes Live
Wikia Search is the highly anticipated search service from the founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales. Much is expected of the search engine as it’s creator has promised to shake up the search engine market and rival services by the major players in the search engine market.
Wikia Search ads open source software and wikipedia-like user editing to search and with this formula hopes to create more relevant and to the point search results for users, by users, free of any corporate influence. Wales noted that the Wikia search will need time to come into it’s own as volunteers help to refine the relevancy and quality of search results.
Live Search Box - Add search to your website or blog
Microsoft is current number three in the search engine race behind Google and Yahoo, but they recently re-branded their search offering to Live Search and even more recently updated their Live Search Engine. Like Yahoo Search Builder, Live search provides a customizable search box that can be used on any web page or blog that searches within a website or the entire web using the Live Search Engine.
The Live Search Box comes in two formats the basic search box or the advanced search box. The basic search box allows for the searching of a specific website or the entire web by copying and pasting a pre formatted code unto a web page and editing the relevant section with the language code that your website is displayed in. The advanced search box offers more options and allows for the searching a specific websites and the customization of the look and feel of the search box produced.
Advanced Live Search Box Steps
- Choose get started under the advanced search box from the live search menu.
- Type in a display name for the search box being produced; enter the url of the websites or websites to be searched.
- Check or uncheck whether or not a search macro should be used or created for the search bar then click next.
- Customize the size, language and colour of the Live search bar, then click next.
- Finally copy and paste the code generated to the section of a webpage you would like the search bar displayed.
Graphical Representation of Steps
IZEA’s “RealRank” to be Alternative to Google’s “PageRank”
It’s only been a few weeks since the big pagerank branded stick of Google slapped around thousands of websites who were known to or suspected of selling text links on their webpages without using No Follow. A few days however some of the ranks went back to their regular numbers while others stayed hit and this left many website owners puzzled. Over the past few days however the pagerank issue is once again in the air as it seems that many websites are finding not reduced ranks like a few weeks ago but the loss of their pagerank all together. It’s been pointed out that link selling is again the major culprit with special emphasis on blogs who offer sponsored posts or reviews.
Graphical Representation of PageRank
These bloggers are crying foul as many believe that they are fee to do whatever they want with their own websites as long as these paid posts are disclosed and made clear to be what they are.
In comes RealRank
The parent company, IZEA, of one of the biggest paid post firms, PayPerPost, is busy highlighting the flaws in Google’s PageRank rankings while busy developing their own ranking system called RealRank.
The problem with Google PageRank is that it is both self serving and irrelevant to actual traffic and influence. The arbitrary and unpredictable nature of this ranking system has left both bloggers and advertisers longing for accurate statistical data since long before PayPerPost.
Instead the some what monopolistic nature of Google’s ranking and algorithm RealRank proposes a ranking system more up to date and more useful to websites, primarily blogs. This system ranks websites by traffic and inbound links and is expected to be rolled out in a matter of days.
Live Search Webmaster Tools Beta Invitation
We at Caribwebdev.com have been invited to take part in the Live Search Webmaster Tools Beta. So far their have been a few hiccups with the service, but we are now able to access it and will be looking at it’s features over the next few days using caribwebdev.com and other websites in the Heat Ray Media group of websites.
So look out for our first impressions review in a few days.
Yahoo Search Builder - customizable search engine
Google may be the leader in the search engine market, but Yahoo Search is still a important search industry player and internet powerhouse. Yahoo Search Builder is a powerful, easy to use tool provided by Yahoo which enables anyone (primarily web professionals) to create customizable search engine experience for any website. All that is needed is a yahoo email address and in literally minutes anyone start using Yahoo’s search technology on their own website to search the entire web, within a specified website and much more.
Simple Steps
- Navigate the Yahoo Search Builder homepage
- Log in with your Yahoo id
- Define your search engine by choosing a name and search type
- Design search box by choosing the width, colours and encoding
- Customize and brand your search box with your logo, fix it to match the colours of your website among other options
- Test created search box and add the generated code to your web page.
Graphical Representation of Steps
Create multiple engines for multiple websites and view statistics independently with this very useful tool provided by Yahoo. Please read through the Yahoo Search Builder help files if you have any problems with these steps or ask your questions in a comment.
Google Chopping Pageranks in Latest PageRank Update
PageRank is a link analysis and measuring algorithm created by the cofounders of Google Inc Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It measures the relative importance of a webpage on the internet by analyzing the links pointing to the specified page and then assigns a number from 0 to 10 to the page with 10 being a very important page and 0 being a not so important page. Google updates these rankings every couple months and many websites, advertising agencies and search engines put great value of the pagerank of websites. Over time however many websites have begun to abuse the algorithm by selling links on their high ranked pages to boost the rank of the buyers page or linking to webpages in a network with the main purpose being to influence a higher pagerank for linked pages.
October 2007 Updates
Before this month’s update, Google’s last update to pagerank scores came in April 2007 and many were speculating that Google would have lived up to it’s word of devaluing the links of offenders in the next update. This speculation became reality when Google began decreasing the ranks of many known link sellers or link farms, especially blogs and mainstream sites like Forbes.com, Engadget.com and the website of the Washington Post.
Coverage in the Blogosphere
Read more at popular technology blog Techcrunch.com and also visit Dailyblogtips.com who are compiling a list of major sites and blogs affected negatively by the pagerank update.
Microsoft’s Live Search Engine Updated
Microsoft Corp has updated their Live Search engine and has focused mainly on improving searches related to entertainment, shopping, local and health.
“With this update to Live Search, our engineering focus is on the areas that matter most to our 185 million consumers who use our service every month. We have made dramatic progress in delivering a better search experience to our customers,” said Satya Nadella, corporate vice president of the Search and Advertising Platform Group at Microsoft. “We know what kinds of things consumers are searching for, and we have invested in those key high-interest verticals, including entertainment, shopping, health and local search. With the core platform in place we intend to win customers and earn their loyalty one query at a time.”
[ Read full Press Release from Microsoft ]
Live Search Homepage
What does this mean for Caribbean Web Developers?
Google is the undisputed king of search right now with Yahoo a distant second and Microsoft third. Microsoft is focusing on improving it’s search engine to prevent further slippage in it’s already small market share as well as to keep up with improvements being made by Yahoo and Google to their search products. This is good news for Caribbean Web Developers, especially those who follow proper web standards and understand the importance of proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Google is on top and more than like many of us receive the highest percentage of our search engine traffic from Google, but improvements in other search engines allows us to receive good traffic from all major search engines, not only Google.
Google Webmaster Tools Simple Tutorial
Google Webmaster Tools is a free online toolkit provided by Google to website owners. It provides important information to website owners related to their website(s) which allows them to better optimize their websites to attract traffic from search engines.
Registration and Verification
Anybody with a website can sign up for and use Google’s webmaster tools. After signing up users will have to verify each website they add to their account by added a generated html file to their web server or by adding a special meta tag to one of their pages. Once verified users can configure many options related to their site such as how often they want Google’s bots to index their pages, stop certain pages from being indexed, set a preferred format to represent their domain and so on.
Diagnostics, Statistics and Linkage
After registration and verification it will take a few weeks for sufficient data to be collected about your domain but after this waiting period you will be able to access detailed information about your domain. Web crawl errors will point you to troublesome pages which are missing, unreachable, timing out, or returning errors to Google’s crawlers. Top search queries and clicks for domains are displayed so that website owners can track their SEO progress and optimize their content. The Index Stats display the various pages already indexed by Google while the Crawl Stats display average pagerank of your pages while noting the page with the highest rank. Subscriber Stats show a link to any RSS feed or any other form of syndicated content found on your pages by the crawler and the amount of users subscribed to them through Google’s services such as Google reader. The very important links tab allows you to view links within your site as well as links from other sites that point to pages within your website.
Screen shots of Help Page, Homepage and Dashboard
Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file which lists links that are available for crawling on a domain. Some websites have a special page where all links on a site are listed where users can go to better navigate the pages available on a domain, but technically such pages are not sitemaps although they do allow easier access to domain links by site users and search engine bots. Google Webmaster Tool’s supports the adding of text, XML and even RSS sitemaps to a domain listed as long as it is verified and the sitemap file is listed in the root area of the domain. For Example:
http://www.sitename.com/sitemap.xml - correct placement of sitemap
http://www.sitename.com/sitemap.xml - incorrect placement of sitemap that will return an error
Help Centre
Visit the excellent Webmaster Help Centre to find help any issues related to Google Webmaster Tools, adding sitemaps or getting your site listed in Google’s search engine.
