Most of us by now know that Google has been promoting FireFox via the Google search bar plug-in, to the tune of $1.00 for every referral you give them that downloads the browser. Personally I’ve already collected a few dollars from referring to the download from one of my sites.

However, for but a brief moment Google stepped up it’s campaign by showing an advertisement on it’s Google search page. Being that this is by far the most used search engine this brief campaign could have been seen as an endorsement from Google by Thousands? Tens of thousands? of searchers in that brief time. Read on …

Much of the work done by a Webmaster requires repeating the same task over and over. Not only does this waste time but also resources that could be used to further fill the pocket with greenstuff! One task that I’ve found to be a huge timewaster is processing images to be used in eCommerce websites. Common things that need to be done to each picture used are, resizing, optimizing, and placing a watermark on images. There are however ways to relieve much of this drudgery. Read on …

From a recent PR update or something like it, it seems that Google is trying to tweak it’s PR algo.

Many new sites are popping up with high PRs while others sites that should, according to previous expectations, go up in PR stay dormant or drop dramatically. From all these changes recently it is pretty obvious that Google is tweaking and testing their new PR algo, which seems to be heading in a bit of a different direction from the old.

From what I have seen on my sites and some others that have reported on webmaster forums it seems that the premature algo is putting more emphasis on “crawlibility” (quoting Matt Cutts), deep linking, and new content. Blogs, forums, and sites that are updated often with mass amounts of pages of content are getting higher rankings while older smaller sites are staying the same or dropping, which could lead me to believe that Google is quite aware that webmasters are the main audience of the PR, and that they hold a somewhat superficial control over some webmaster by being able to control it, so maybe…they are just trying to get what they want: more pages, cleaner pages, and more often.

So while I think all linking theory will still hold up, as it is the only way to determine a sites popularity, I think Google is starting to put a lot more emphasis on cleaner large content sites, bot-candy, and the new PR number will be a representation of it.

So what is this mean?
For one thing I think the sand-box is definitely dead.

What might have caused this drastic change?
Well I think Google noticed how MSNs algo was getting pretty good, like many others on the web, and their apparent emphasis on fresh content might have swayed Google to ditch the sand-box and other nuances dealing with age.

All this is nice, but lets just hope Google doesn’t make a mess out of this one, the first taste of this new algo has been quite bitter, even with rises.

Ah, the temptation. Find a competitor who is doing well in the SERPs, and instead of trying to beat them in the organic searches, just purchase their name in Adwords. Watch the visitors start pouring in, as well as maybe a lawsuit. And thus you have “Edina Realty, Inc. v. TheMLSonline.com”. Read on …