Over the last few years the emergence of Google as THE power on the internet has been nothing short of remarkable.  Their shares have gone up by over 500% since they started trading on the US stock market, they have over powered the likes and MSN and Yahoo! and now they are looking to re-write the whole internet links industry.  When they were growing it was fun to piggy-back the whole proactive stance of Google, but now they are pulling the strings and dictating to webmasters many are now starting to ask whether they are just too powerful?

The recent page ranking exercise was the last straw for many webmasters with some sites receiving massive downgrades, potentially costing the industry millions of dollars in lost income, because of so called “paid links”.  Some are questioning the reasoning behind these recent downgrades, with suggestions that Google are frustrated that they are not receiving a slice of the paid links pie with webmasters forced to try and disguise these from Googlebots.  So what next?

While there is no doubt that the page rank system is still very important to rankings and income from the internet, many webmasters are placing less emphasis on their site rankings than they once did.  There is a feeling that Google have caused themselves a major problem by manipulating their algorithms to suit their own ends, rather than taking into account the views of webmasters around the world. 

The problem going forward is the fact that the likes of MSN and Yahoo! are not in a position to compete with Google on a worldwide basis, leaving the field open for Google to manipulate the situation yet further.  However, if rumours about a marriage of MSN and Yahoo! are correct (we have heard these rumours on many occasions in the past) then there may actually be someone who can even try to compete with Google.  As it stands Google have the market to themselves with little likelihood of a short term change in this position.

Yesterday I got a question about how to setup RSS feeds or sitemaps so I'm planning to tell you that today.

Some people doesn't understand that RSS feeds and sitemaps are two completely different things. They are both a kind of XML files, but they are used for two different purposes. Sitemap is a standard first used by Google to find all your web pages so they can easily be spidered by their Googlebot (read more about the standard at www.sitemaps.org). Yahoo and Microsoft have both lately started to use this format too to find new web pages to spider

While sitemaps are mainly for search engine spiders, RSS feeds are intended for people (or at least feed readers used by people) who would like to subscribe to for example news and other events from a blog or forum with frequently updated content.

Setup RSS feeds for your blog

This is really simple if you're using Wordpress or any other famous blog software: RSS feeds are already included. Simply visit sampleaddress.com/feed or sampleaddress.com/rss to view your feed. If you need some more features like statistics and customized functions then you should register your feed at FeedBurner.com. They offer a loot of cool features for your feed like animated banners:

Setup a sitemap for your blog

There's a fantastic plugin for Wordpress to create your own sitemap. Visit Arne Brachhold's blog and download the plugin. It's really easy to install and activate in your blog (almost no work at all ).

Setup a sitemap for a static web site

If your web site is static or doesn't change that often (i.e. you rarely add any new pages), then you can use a sitemap generator like xml-sitemaps.com. At xml-sitemaps.com you fill in the main page of your web site (like www.sampleaddress.com) and wait a few seconds depending on how main pages your site got. Download the newly created sitemap and upload it to your web account where you got your main index.html file (for example www.sampleaddress.com/index.html).

When you have your sitemap ready you need to register it at the search engines so they can find it. This can be done at the following sites:

• https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
• https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites
• http://webmaster.live.com/
• http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

PayJunction is a payment gateway that can process payments at your office, on our web site and "on the go" wireless. You can choose on your own how you need or would like to process your credit card transactions. . For the wireless part you only need access to a WiFi network to process the card transactions.

Merchant accounts

PayJunction doesn't provide merchant accounts on it's own but is instead a broker for several providers with whom they set up their clients accounts with. The specific provider will be chosen based upon the clients needs and business type. Different providers specialize in different types of accounts, so it is very beneficial for the client to be matched up with the proper one. The auction like format for placing accounts also allows PayJunction to negotiate for the best rates available which of course benefit the clients because as you know a small cost costume is necessary in todays world where everyone is competing about the lowest prices.

Accounting and reporting

You get real-time reporting via their interface called Trinity where you can view and search for specific transactions. You can of course download the transactions in several formats like Microsoft Excel, XML and CSV so the transactions can be imported into your accounting software without having to type each transaction in manually.

Plugins

Third-party plugin's are supported by the system so you can easily integrate the credit card processing in your shopping cart or your order system.