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When Google rose to the top of the search engine food chain, they created several commodities. One of them was backlinks. Google’s algorithm places a premium on the number of incoming links to a site. The more incoming links a site has, the higher the site will rank. The higher it ranks, the more traffic it will get. The more traffic it gets, the more money it will make.
And so the link commodity was born. There are link building services, link brokers, link traders, social bookmarking services, directory submissions, and assorted other operations built around this new cottage industry. One of them, Text-Link-Ads, even has a little calculator to show how much you can earn by selling links on your site.
Of course, Google doesn’t treat all links as equal. Links from authority domains or on-topic domains weigh more than links from Joe Blow’s PR1 blog. But that doesn’t stop the link scammers. They’ve even developed nice little charts showing how to gain high page rank from masses of low ranking incoming links. And even if page rank doesn’t directly translate to high search engine result positions (SERP’s), that doesn’t stop people from buying and selling scammy links.
Back in college, I knew a couple of guys who would subscribe to magazines under the name Mr. William M. Later. Then they’d get 2-3 months of free subscriptions to Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, etc. until the magazines wised up and realized that no one named William M. Later (aka, Bill Me Later) was going to pay up.
I was reminded of this when Andy Brice, creator of the legitimate 5-Cow ranked table planning software Perfect Table Plan, wrote a piece about the fake awards granted by some download sites. He created a fake piece of software called awardmestars (that’s AwardMeStars for the camel-case impaired). This software could have been written by William M. Later because it does nothing. It’s a text file with the extension changed to .exe and the product description even says that “this product does nothing.” And yet, many of the cheesier software download sites still awarded him 5 Stars.
Now that Andy’s article is making the rounds, I’m positive that more than a few link scammers will pick up on this. All they need is a text editor and a copy of Robosoft, and soon they will have hundreds of back links from low rent software directories. And I hope they do. If these software directories start getting bombarded with fake submissions, maybe they’ll actually clean up their act and stop accepting all kinds of crappy software and awarding these rankings worth less than a Commemorative Lincoln Medallion.
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If you use FireFox on a daily basis, no doubt you have your own list of favorite add-ons. But who has the time to constantly be on the lookout for new ones? So, this list was put together for anyone who does business online and needs tools to help you be more efficient.
The Top 10
1. InFormEnter
What it is: When you turn it on, it adds a little 
button next to all the form fields on a web page. Clicking the button pops up a list of all the phrases you’ve saved:
Why you’ll like it: It’s a great time saver for any web forms requiring name, address, email, product description – you name it.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/673
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2. ScrapBook
What it is: A tool that takes snapshots of the current web page. You can organize your scrapbook items in folders and access them through the menu or a sidebar:
Why you’ll like it: From a business perspective, it’s good for recording receipts of online purchases. Plus the edit page capability allows you to erase elements, making it easy to clean up a page for printout.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427
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3. Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE)
What it is: This extension allows you to save all your FireFox data, including passwords, bookmarks, themes, extensions, preferences, and more:
Why you’ll like it: If you do enough business on the internet, eventually your find that a lot of mission critical information is stored in your browser. Backing up this data becomes crucial.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2109
[Note, this extension has a companion extension – CLEO that will combine all your extensions into a single .xpi file for easy reinstall: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2942]
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4. ViewMyCurrency
What it is: A tool that will convert any amount on a page to your selected currencies. Click the status bar button 
and any currency values found on the page will be changed, as the following before and after pictures show:
Why you’ll like it: This is probably more useful for those outside the U.S., but it’s handy for anyone that wants to save themselves a trip to www.xe.com to get convert prices into your local currency.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1854
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5. WorldClocks
What it is: A tool that shows you the current day and time for selected cities around the globe. Clicking on the status bar display, it pops up a list of all the cities you’ve added. You can either use the built-in list of cities or set up your own.
Why you’ll like it: It’s great for figuring out when someone halfway around the world is likely to be at work.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3010
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6. Fetch Text URL
What it is: A tool that allows you to right-click on a non-linked, text URL and fetch it in a new tab.
Why you’ll like it: It saves you added typing.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/518
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7. SearchStatus
What it is: A SEO tool that sits in your status bar. You can see the Google Page Rank and Alexa rank, and you can access the robots.txt, archive.org (aka, Wayback Machine), and whois of the current site via the popup menu.
Why you’ll like it: Unlike other SEO toolbars, it’s unobtrusive and provides quick access to information.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/321
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8. RankQuest SEO Toolbar
What it is: A full featured SEO toolkit (accessible via toolbar or context menu) that provides a number of analysis tools for webmasters. Included are speed test, a lynx viewer (how does the Google bot see your page), meta tag analysis and generator, keyword density analysis, text ratio calculator, and many more tools.
Why you’ll like it: It packs a lot of tools into a single toolbar. But, toolbars take up page space so this one is better off hidden most of the time, and SearchStatus (above) is more convenient for day to day info.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1471
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9. Web Developer
What it is: A toolbar with a wide assortment of tools to provide you with info about the current page. It has too many features to cover here. The snapshot below left is the information panel shown when clicking on any page element. The snapshot below right is an example of the CSS editor (in this case, in the left sidebar).
Why you’ll like it: This list is for Internet Entrepreneurs, not web developers, but this is a handy tool for anyone who owns a web site. It’s helpful for debugging CSS layout problems. Added bonus, too many sites today think it’s cool to have low-contrast text. No problem. With the Web Developer toolbar you can simply identify the element containing the text and then edit the CSS in the side bar and have the page style updated instantly.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
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10. PwdHash
What it is: An automatic password generator.
Why you’ll like it: Security, security, security. With this tool, there’s no excuse for using the same easy to remember password for forums as you would for your online banking account.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1033
[Note: The author of Allow Right-Click, listed below, also has an "Always Remember Password" add-on that lets FireFox save passwords for sites that normally don't allow it: http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/03/always-remember-password/]
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5 Honorable Mentions
Yoono
What it is: A sidebar toolbar that shows related web sites for the one you’re currently on.
Why you’ll like it: This is incredibly handy for both topic research and seeking out sites for back links.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1833
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Allow Right-Click
What it is: Overrides any web scripting that disables right-clicking your mouse and getting the context menu.
Why you’ll like it: If deal with web pages (or control panels) that disable right-clicks, this add-on will let you context menu item.
Link: http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/03/allow-right-click/
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Image Zoom
What it is: Right-click on any image and zoom in via the context menu.
Why you’ll like it: Bigger is sometimes better.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/139
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IE View
What it is: Opens the current page in Internet Explorer. (Note there is also IE Tab add-on, which runs IE in a FireFox tab. Both work equally well.)
Why you’ll like it: Some websites are still operating in IE only mode. This tool will make swear at the screen less.
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/35
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Overwhelmed by all the advice you read about running an AdWords campaign? Here’s a simple and concise list I’ve gathered from several reliable sources:
- Break your campaign in groups of 10-20 highly related keywords.
- Use exact matching or phrase matching, but avoid broad matching.
- Use negative keywords (e.g., -free) to improve CTR & lower cost.
- Put keywords in the headline and repeat them in the body.
- Body: 1st line = descriptive benefit and 2nd line = a feature, offer, or call to action.
- Create separate landing pages for each target keyword group and make content relevant to keywords, putting the landing pages in sub-directories named after target keywords and making sure the sub-directory is included in display URL: www.blah.com/keyword.
- Find tangential keywords. **
- Always run 2 ads side-by-side. ***
- Run different campaigns for different geographical regions (e.g. US vs. Europe).
- Search Search Network and Content network ads in separate campaigns with lower CPC and daily budgets.
Notes:
* Make sure to disallow duplicated pages in your robots.txt file to avoid Google’s duplicate content penalty.
** Example of tangential keywords: I make flowcharting software. I targeted the keywords “E-Myth” and “EMyth” because I figured entrepreneurs who were standardizing their business processes might want to flowchart them. It worked.
*** Shuffle the word order, capitalization, try synonyms, price vs no price, etc. Run a week at a time and always replace the poor performer with a tweaked version of the good performer.
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I started using Google Sitemaps several months ago to ensure that my site was getting fully indexed by the Googlebot. Aside from the obvious indexing advantages, Google Sitemaps also offer a few other insights to your web site. One of the more interesting ones is the Page Analysis feature.
Page Analysis has a Common Words section with 2 parts - words used in your site’s content and in external links to your site. The second part, words in external links, is the topic of this post.
The first time I glanced at this page I was surprised to see my name (Nick) show up as one of the words in external links. I can understand Nicholas Hebb being used to link to my site, because I use my full name when submitting FlowBreeze to software download sites.
I only used Nick Hebb in a link when posting to the Business of Software forum. Most forums I just use nhebb. The interesting thing is that Business of Software forum uses both a robots nofollow meta tag and the rel=”nofollow” attribute in links to avoid forum spam, just like Google recommends for Blogger users.
So I decided to do a test. For the last month, I changed my signature from Nick Hebb to Flow Chart Geek. The result: Geek now shows up as a a word used in external links in my Sitemaps Page Analysis.
I don’t know if this is conclusive evidence that Google is ignoring the nofollow attribute for non-Blogger users, but it seems to point that way.
