Today there was the release of the new interface for the Google Groups, a community styled system with WYSIWYG functionality and file storage.

Web products for groups have traditionally focused on an email thread or message board format; they’ve been largely text based. Google Groups, however, now provides a richer forum for group collaboration with the following new features…

A quote from the official press release. Read the rest of this entry »

Building inbound links to your website is one of the most important techniques to get traffic by linked websites and also from search engines like Google. While PPC (pay per Click) campaigns are only effective for the time where the campaign is running, the text link is also used to build a higher Google PageRank.

Text Link Ads (TLA) is a place where publisher and advertiser meet each other. For the publisher is there a way to monetize his website or Blog with only a onetime installment of some server side code. Once approved the publisher need only to approve new advertisers.

Any Advertiser can choose from different type of websites or Blog to place his link on. He can search by category, sort by rankings, by price and any combination of them. Because selecting the right publisher is sometimes a hard job, the advertiser can use the free service from TLA to get a custom text link campaign for his needs.

To create the maximum result any advertiser should place a text link for at least 3-6 month. A second product from TLA is the RSS link; this way the text link or ad is placed inside RSS feed from a Blog site.

Is Google PR getting more importance than is due to it? It would seem so considering the barrage of threads on different webmaster forums with respect to the impending PR update. DP, Sitepoint, Namepros all have various threads where one of the members seems to have noticed a PR change to one of his sites and declares that the PR update is underway. There are numerous replies to such threads, most of them inconsequential.

Originally, PR was designed in such a way so that the importance of a page could be identified based on a number from 0 to 10 - 0 being lowest importance and 10 being the highest. The logic is, if more sites link to your site, then yours is an important site and has relevant content. Fair enough. It went wrong when webmasters were able to manipulate the PR by linking their own sites to each other and also by buying links from other sites. This meant that sites with no valuable content could have higher PR than other sites which are more useful. Read the rest of this entry »

In the quest for monetizing their website, webmasters sometimes forget the base fact that they own the site and not Google Adsense! So, often you see webmasters ask questions like ‘Whether Adsense TOS allows linking to such and such site or whether the TOS allows pictures next to ads and so on and so forth. As long as the queries are related to simple ad placement it may be OK but more and more webmasters are getting influenced by the TOS and ad returns that they are willing to modify the content itself. This cannot be good news for the internet since finally it is the quality of information that matters along with the way it is presented. If you are good at presenting your knowledge in a certain way (say, first person), then you should continue to do so, irrespective of whether Google Adsense representatives likes it or not. Read the rest of this entry »