MSN Live Search is definitely catching up. It has a pretty decent site index and cache, a nifty IP search tool (just type in ip:ip.address.here in the search box), and a nifty way of seeing your backlinks using linkdomain:site.com. (Anyone want to add some more to this budding flower?)

The most recent addition to live.com seems to be its linkfromdomain:site.com functionality. This feature allows users to see what kind of outbound links are on your site.

This is a great tool for webmasters and SEOs to get an idea of what your competitors are linking to. Furthermore, it’s a great tool to detect which sites have relevance to the same topic you may be working on.

There has been a lot of controversy in terms of SEO lately. First, there’s this scathing article by Daniel Dessinger about the SEO industry, which prompted a lot of questions, many of whom are wondering if Daniel is on the money, or at least close, but others who have tried to invalidate the claim. I give Rand another thumbs up in terms of his excellent refutation, but I can’t help but wonder from the standpoint of a SEO newbie (if I’ve even made it there yet): with more people like me who have the interest in SEO, will the market get oversaturated?

Let me rephrase the question. As more and more people become more educated with what makes a good SEO, we can face two dilemmas:

1. There will be more Aaron Walls, Barry Schwartzes, Danny Sullivans, and Rand Fishkins in the world. Will the industry be able to handle them all? Better yet, is there even room for newcomers to move up?
2. Is the current industry too competitive? Will more and more people get better at SEO, forcing it to collapse entirely? Will the exposure of more and more individuals to correct SEO strategies ultimately cause the SEO as we know it to change — possibly to even eliminate it?

As a new blogger and a new face to the crowd of SEO, I’m faced with this big challenge: where are my readers going to come from? I encountered this issue before when I first started blogging back on my personal blog (now defunct … or rather, just hidden) back in the day, but my friends were not the type of people who were actually interested in reading everything — though I will admit that I did have a good following among the closer ones. I will credit Andy Hagans for his excellent guide to getting out of the sandbox so that people will actually know who I am and maybe consider me to be an authority one day.

What is this sandbox that I speak of? I’m new, so allow me to introduce this, even though you’ve seen it hundreds of times before if you’re already in the industry. The sandbox effect is a Google method of basing its rankings (bringing them to the top of the search engines) on a trust mechanism. Furthermore, older sites (and domain names) fare better. Getting your site on authoritative sites is critical. Link bait is a necessity for people like me, and the list by Jim Westergren, while old, still holds true today and is a great starting point. This guide by Andy at TextLinkAds (also known as TLA) is definitely worth serious mention and consideration.