SEO / SEM blog

Google, after announcing to be able to index FLASH files now gives advices of how to use FLASH on the Official Google Webmaster Central blog. Here is what they suggest:

Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google’s YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.

sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.

Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page “splash screen” where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash.

I would say that you should keep advice number 1 close to you: Try to use Flash only where it is needed. If its not needed, don’t use it.

If you are wandering if its good or bad for your website my article “Flash and SEO - is Flash still bad for your website?” may help you make a decision.

Sphere: Related Content

Delicious, a highly popular social bookmarking service changed the design and domain name from del.icio.us to delicious.com to avoid user misspelled errors.

We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends - Delicious blog.

You can read the whole story about website redesign on Delicious blog. They also made a video explaining sites new feature available on Flickr.

But thats not what i wanted to write about.

The redesign and domain name change tool place on July 31st, 2008. Today is 19th of August 2008 and i made a simple search query for “Delicious“. And guess what, there are 2 results both from old and new domain names on Google.

(Click on image to enlarge).

I also checked if they used any redirect and of course they did use a 301 search engine friendly permanent redirect so thats not the problem.

So what is the problem? I guess it takes time for Google to follow the redirection and index the whole website at the new domain name.

Can it cause a duplicate content issues until they manage to index the website again? It shouldn’t. As long as there is permanent redirection used Google will not ban a website for a duplicate content issue.

It simply takes time for Google and other search engines to index the site again under new domain name. And because Delicious is a very big website containing hundred of thousands of pages it may take some time to index it all again.

After some weeks the duplicate result on Google should dissapear and you should see only one, delicious.com website.

Sphere: Related Content

Google have released their new product called Insights for Search (beta). It is created for advertisers to help them understand their market by region and display information with search volume data.

Like Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges - Inside AdWords blog.

(Click on the image to enlarge to full-screen).

What can you do with Google Insights for search?

1. Find out which keywords have more popularity among your target audience.
   If you are not sure which keywords should you use you can compare several keywords, set the time frame and region to see which keyword is the best one to use.
2. Determine seasonality.
   Check when is the best time to start a promotional campaign or when to start Google AdWords PPC campaign. With this information business owner may predict sales, number staff members necessary and so on.
3. Check your competition.
   With Insights for Search an advertiser is able to associate a brand or a product with a company that may be their competition. That way creating a more successful ad campaign is more precise.
4. Search for new markets.
   If your company is growing or if its loosing a lot of money on wrong advertising you may want to check the trends of your target audience. If you you selling one kind of red whine while your target audience wants to buy another kind of wine you should change that immediately to suit your customers needs. Now you can check the interests of your customers and make your business grow even faster by finding the right market.

You can download the results of your research to a CSV spreadsheet but only when you are logged in to your Google account you will see actual data in the spreadsheet.

I have noticed that depending on the referrer website on Google, the Insights for Search have 2 different favicon images. Strange, but Google seems to have problems with sticking to one design.

Google AdWords blog about Google Insights for Search.

Google Insights for Search FAQ.

Sphere: Related Content

Delicious, a social bookmarking service is using cloaking methods on their website.

Shocked?

Delicious is using a <meta name”robots” content”noarchive,noindex,nofollow”> attributes on every web page of their website. That theoretically should exclude their website from being indexed by Google and other search engines. Also their Robots.txt file is showing

User-agent:
Disallow: /

But if you check on Google for “site:del.icio.us” search query you will see lots of results from their website. What it means is that Delicious is using some sort of a cloaking method to stop unwanted users to index their website and spammers from entering their website.

Is it useful? If it wasn’t they wouldn’t use it.

Is it prohibited? As long as they dont try to fake search engine it should be ok with search engines.

Can i use it too? If you think it will benefit your website without being suspected for cheating you can try it at your own risk.

Sphere: Related Content

If you are trying hard and spending hours to search but still can’t find what you were looking for on Google, you may suggest an improvement to them directly.

On the bottom of the search results page click on “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” and you will be forwarded to the form page.

Quality suggestion form:

After you fill in the form, Google quality team will review your suggestion and maybe it will help to create even more relevant results for that specific search query. That way you are helping Google to give better results and also other searchers that are looking for the same information as you.

You may also use the following url to suggest changes to any query you wish:

http://www.google.com/quality_form?q=type+some+query+here

Change type+some+query+here to any search query you wish and separate words by + sign.

Sphere: Related Content

Yahoo! is offering many advanced techniques to help users find what they are looking for in a more efficient and time saving manner. Its called Yahoo! Shortcuts.

What is a Yahoo Shortcut? A Yahoo! Shortcut automatically appears when it is relevant to your search and can contain links to useful content from Yahoo!, its partners, or across the web.

Lets see briefly the tools.

Yahoo! Search Assistant

When you type a search query in Yahoo! you can get suggestions as you write about similar keywords.

When you type in the search box, Search Assist predicts what you’re searching for and offers you suggestions.

Search Assistant lets you also narrow your search query by exploring concepts, a categories based segregation. After you click on any topic the search results page will reload automatically showing you more customized results.

Yahoo! local business

type into Yahoo! search engine pizza ny and you shall see a map with various pizza locations in New York, USA.

Yahoo! events

Shows you upcoming events in a city/state region for queries such as events new york.

Local restaurants

Restaurants new york search query will present you with a list of local restaurants in New York, USA.

Yahoo! area code lookup

If you are looking to match an area code with state/city in the US Yahoo! area code lookup with come handy. Just type any area code from USA and Yahoo! will show you which city does it belong to.

Yahoo! zip code lookup

Are you trying to find city zip codes in USA? Just type “zip code” followed by any city name and Yahoo! will tell you which city it belongs to.

Weather check

If you want to check weather in any city type [city name] weather.

Yahoo! maps

Check a location on a map before you hit the road with Yahoo! maps. Use street address, a city, and a state.

Gas price check

Type “gas” and zip code in the search box to find out the prices of gas in your local area.

Check traffic jams with Yahoo! Shortcuts

A search query containing name of a city and “traffic” will result in showing you the latest news about traffic jams to help you avoid them.

Travel search

Plan your trip, get ideas on how to spend your free time on holiday with a popular holiday city name search query.

Search hotel

Find a hotel before you go. Type hotel chain name and city name.

Hotel choice

Want to check hotel prices? Type “hotel” and city name to compare hotels.

Hotel comparison

Compare prices of hotels by using “compare” city name and “hotel” search combination.

Flight comparison

Compare flight tickets. Type “flights from” city name “to” and another city name.

Flight status

Check flight status by typing airline name and flight number.

Local time check

What’s the time in London now? Type “time in” and city name to find out.

Currency converter

Convert currencies by typing “convert”, amount you want to convert and “to” followed by currency you want to convert to.

News

Stay up to date and check news frequently.

Stock quote

Check stock market and type stock ticker abbreviation or company name and “quote.”

Sport players

Get player statistics by typyng their name into Yahoo! search engine.

Sport scores

Type the team name and “scores.”

Images

Type subject name (city name, actor name, animal name etc.) and “photo”

Shopping

No explanation needed. Just type a product name.

Coupons

Spend less money with coupons. Locate them by typing the retailer name and “coupon”.

Check UPC codes

Type a UPC code to find out the manufacturer.

Find cars

If you want to buy a car you can use Yahoo! to locate them. Type car brand or type and city name.

Track UPS packages

type UPS package number and track it with Yahoo!

Movies search

Check latest movies and trailers by typyng a movie name.

Yahoo! is also showing special Olympics results.

Yahoo! is really good with those shortcuts and present valuable data in them. You should definietely use them to make your search experience even better, faster and more relevant.

If i forgot about something please let me know.

Sphere: Related Content

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is dealing with natural (organic, algorithmic) results in various search engines. Its main goal is to achieve high rankings in search engine result pages (SERP’s) for targeted keyword or key phrases. High positions will bring traffic to the site and possibly turn visitors into customers.

SEO is long process, you can not do seo in 5 minutes. It’s constant process, evolving with time thought analysis, changing market and competition. It takes time to establish a brand, gain inbound links, trust and targeted traffic to the website. But the outcome of seo process is long lasting, or at least should be.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) on the other hand is a greater sphere than seo. SEM consists of SEO, paid placement (PPC) and paid inclusion.

In some cases you have to pay to be included in search engines indexes or pay for showing your ad in the ad network based on click value (Pay-Per-Click) or other method.

SEM incorporates various Internet marketing techniques which use search engines as an advertising medium.

In general:
SEM = SEO + PPC

Good understanding and differentiation between SEM and SEO might save you some embarrassment and also being educated is always a good thing. So when you talk about seo, don’t say how much you have spent on PPC campaign, as it’s part of sem.

Sphere: Related Content

Since Adobe informed that they cooperated with the biggest search engine companies to improve Flash indexation and Google officially confirmed they can index Flash content there is a lot of discussion whether Flash is good or still bad for websites.

There are some that will say Flash is evil. But there are some that will say Flash is great tool for websites. Well, i guess it depends on the context and situation.

First lets take a look at downsides of using Flash on your website:

1. Single URL for different content.
   Flash is used to show many informations in one place. Flash may include many movies, text content, frames etc. yet it feeds the user with all those informations from single URL, no page refresh is necessary. Since different content is showed from single URL it is hard (or in many cases impossible) to link to those individual parts of informations directly making link building very hard job to do.
2. Load time.
   Big Flash presentations (including movies, sounds, pictures) may take a long time to load in user web browser, especially when user is using slow Internet connection, making many people to leave before they see the content.
3. Intros.
   Some Flash developers create an Intro scene or animation to introduce the content to the user. The problem with this is that it consumes users time. The user visiting your website have a goal: to find informations quickly. And if you order them to watch intro every time they reload or visit your page they will feel irritated and they will stop using your website.
4. Disabled Back button.
   If you use Flash that disables the Back button, know that ‘back button is the second most important navigation element after hyperlinks’ - says usability expert Jacob Nielsen. You should take usability seriously and leave the Back button working properly. If you don’t do that you might loose many users.
   Disabling Back button also is against Google AdWords guidelines, so remember that if you want to advertise your Flash website on Google, you have to keep Back button working.
5. Poor content updates.
   With Flash adding or removing content becomes not so easy task that in most cases requires hiring a professional. Frequently updated website is more useful to the users as they seek for the latest news, not the news from yesterday and the problem with Flash is that it tends to be created once and left alone.
6. Usability.
   Flash has different structure than text. Some older visitors or visitors with disabilities may feel unfamiliar with that environment and immediately leave your website to a text based website.
   You can not change the font size text in Flash, thus visitors are forced to read the text in specified font size, which is usually to small to read comfortably.
   You may not use some of your web browser features. “Find in that page” feature does not work, your web browser will not find anything on a Flash site.
7. Search Engines still don’t index all Flash.
   Currently only Google implemented the Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library, meaning only Google started to index Flash. Other search engines are still “blind” for Flash.
   And even Google have some limitations. Google can not see images in Flash files, Flash files loaded from JavaScript, content written in bidirectional languages (Hebrew and Arabic languages) and Google will index separately any files loaded by the Flash file (such as external HTML file, an XML file or another SWF file).

Now take a look on positive things about using Flash:

1. Interactive.
   Flash let’s you create multimedia presentations, online games etc. It lets you create things not possible with text-based static websites. It lets you create a connection with your users, let them be in control.
2. Good impression.
   Flash makes you want to see more. It makes you want to use it, see what it can do. It makes your users want to stay on your website and come back for more.
3. Flash applications.
   You can create a Flash applications including interactive tutorials, presentations, online courses with its own web interface and navigation menu.

Conclusion.

My final thought about Flash is: it depends what you want to achieve. In some cases using Flash is a good way, and in some cases its a bad thing.

I never thought Flash is bad or good. I am not a Flash lover or hater. Flash is a tool. And if used properly it may benefit you, but used in a wrong way it will only harm, harm a lot. What i mean is that Flash can be good and can be bad.

Flash has no rivals when it comes to interactivity with users, with flashiness. The user experience on Flash websites may be as good as on text-websites. It depends how you build your website and for whom.

Anyway, before you consider using Flash read the above pros and cons to figure out the best solution for your website.

As far as I’m concerned from SEO point of view i will consider each website separately. I do not judge if Flash is good or bad for all websites as every website is different.

Sphere: Related Content

Google is trying to repair the bad impression about the company because of the lack of Privacy Policy on their home page for so long and now they try to provide many informations on how they use private data in their search engine results.

Google Customized Web Search results use personal data, such as IP address, residence address of a user (if signed in to Google Account), recent searches and web history to provide more accurate results based on user location and past web behavior and habits.

Now Google customized results will be showing a message in the upper right corner of the search results page like this:

After clicking on “More Details” a user will see the following explanation page:

Pictures from Google.com

Google, by default, is using user IP address to determine the location of a user to provide more customized results. It doesn’t matter if you signed in or not. Also…

Your specific location will be used not only for customizing search results, but also to improve your experience in Google Maps and other Google products.

Regardless to sign in status Google also…

take into account whether a particular query followed on the heels of another query. Because recent search activity provides such valuable context for understanding the meaning behind your searches, we use it to customize your results whenever possible…

The only aspect of customized search results you have control over is your web history.

[Web History] belongs to you and you have complete control over it. You can remove specific items or pause the service at any time.

If you are signed out of Google Account your web history will not be taken into account when serving customized search results.

In the end Google says:

We consider this to be an important step in our commitment to transparency, and we hope you find it informative and useful.

Well, obviously Google is trying to do all they can to inform users what sort of information do they use in their search technology and i believe it’s a good thing to do. People should know how Google store and use user data. But the problem is that not everyone will read it and not everyone will know what data does Google use and how.

Sphere: Related Content

I wanted to check how fast are search engines in crawling the web. After publishing blog post “How to move WordPress blog from old domain to new domain with 301 permanent redirection” i went to Google, Yahoo! and MSN to check how fast can they find that new post.

It was kind of search engines speed test, like the one you do to test your bandwidth speed but instead of your bandwidth i tested how fast search engines find information on Internet.

Google

Google was really fast in this matter. When i checked it after only 3 hours, the post was already there! I have published the post on August 6, 2008 at 1:00 pm and when i checked at 4:30 pm on Google the post was there already for 30 minutes!

Yahoo!

After the same period of time Yahoo! showed no results.

The Yahoo! search results message says:

We did not find results for: “How to move WordPress blog from old domain to new domain with 301 permanent redirection”. Try the suggestions below or type a new query above.

MSN

MSN was no better. It also returned similiar not found message:

The message says:

We did not find any results for “How to move WordPress blog from old domain to new domain with 301 permanent redirection”.

Conclusion

Google is much faster in picking changes on blogs than other search engines. Maybe it’s because they have separate Google blog search engine which is specially designed to keep an eye on blog changes. Other search engines don’t have special blog search engines specialised to find new posts/pages or changes within them.

Anyway Google is really fast nowadays in searching for new web pages on the Internet.

After 7 hours of waiting for Yahoo! or MSN to pick up the new post, still nothing and i give up. Maybe my website doesn’t have enough reputation for those search engines to index it more frequently. So how good news from a website like mine is supposed to reach users as fast as possible? Only through Google.

[Update August 11, 2008] After 4 days since publishing my post and checking the search engines for the first time i have checked again Yahoo! and MSN. To my surprise Yahoo! showed just 2 results (both from my website) and MSN showed 30 results but NONE of them was from my blog!

Do you have any experience in search engines crawling speed? Share your discoveries.

Sphere: Related Content