Over the past few months, Google has taken a firm stand against Webmasters using paid links to increase their page rankings - going so far as to require site owners to report exactly which links they've paid for and which are more "natural." If the search giant finds paid links that haven't been tagged as such, then both the site owner and the site that provided the links could be penalized. Meanwhile, a huge debate in the search community over whether this is good or bad for business has ensued. This StraightUpSearch blog post details both sides of …

Mozilla's FireFox browser offers hundreds of customization tools for users -- extensions that block ads, check spelling and disable malicious scripts, for example. This post lists the top 8 FireFox add-ons that make a search pro's life easier -- including SearchStatus (which gives a view of how each page visited is ranked according to Google's PageRank, Compete.com, and Alexa, among others) and X-Ray 0.8.1 (which displays a given page's source code without making the user jump between browser windows).

There are a number of meta search engines -- tools that aggregate the results of a specific query from multiple search sites -- but meta search is more of a "supplement to," than a "replacement for," traditional search. But some Webmasters are using Ixquick's rating-based meta search as a way to gauge how well their sites rank against a competitor's for specific queries overall. Ixquick.com also supports several "power search" features like Boolean logic and wild cards, and the engine also aggregates data from verticals like phone directories and comparison shopping sites.

Microsoft updated its AdCenter offering over the weekend, improving the user interface as per Webmaster requests and feedback. The top change makes it easy for users to view keyword statistics and manage their bids on the same page -- a major timesaver. The piece also provides a link to Microsoft's pdf that details the upgrades in full.

Local search seems to be one of the verticals that could best benefit from the blending of social networking and search -- as personal experience with a local business could go a long way to raising (or lowering) its ranking. In a bid to increase user retention as well as leverage the power of social interaction for search, local product and promotion site ShopLocal.com has added community-building tools like profile creation and discussion forums.

The U.S. government (acting through the FBI) can no longer send secret data requests to search engines under The Patriot Act, as a district court judge has ruled that the provision violates free speech rights. It's unknown whether search giants like Google and Yahoo have received these requests in the past, because the law made it illegal to even reveal that the FBI had asked for the information.

More companies are using blogs and RSS feeds to communicate with consumers - but this fresh content can't draw in new traffic if it's not searchable. Ross Dunn gives a detailed overview of the basics of optimizing blogs and feeds for the search engines, from providing an easily accessible listing of the top-ten blog posts (to ensure that these popular post don't get buried in archives) to placing RSS auto-discovery tags in the header of every page that has feeds available.

ValueClick has been under fire lately, both from shareholders who have filed class-action lawsuits against the ad network for its allegedly illicit lead generation practices, as well as finance types who've been steering their clients away from the stock. While the ad network denies any illegal activities, ValueClick has acknowledged that incentive-based lead generation is part of the business strategy. Pablo Palatnik's piece on Search Engine Journal highlights one search pro's ValueClick experience -- rife with poor customer service, frustration and worthless leads.

Web site optimization and development projects often take up large chunks of a search pro's time -- so ensuring that the experience will be positive and that there are reasonable client expectations can save weeks and months of frustration. But sometimes there are clear signs that a client will be difficult to work for. NGen Works' Carl Smith lists five early signals that should send search pros running in the opposite direction.

Vertical search engines like Zillow.com (for real estate), and DentalProducts.net (for dentists) serve to deliver user results tied precisely to the category they're interested in -- often with more relevance and expert sources than search on a big engine. But Google's Custom Search Engine allows Webmasters to tap into its core search API and essentially create their own vertical search engines -- moving beyond crawling and indexing information on their own site to give users results from relevant sites from all over the Web.