With the recent new releases by Google and Yahoo concerning advances in crawling flash, we are very pleased to share this timely and very informative article by V7N SEO Blog guest author
S. Emerson of Accrete Web Solutions.

The web design and search engine optimization communities are a buzz in the last few days with an announcement that hit the news that it will now be possible to create search engine friendly flash files.

Google and Yahoo to Search Inside Flash Files

“Adobe announced Tuesday that Google and Yahoo are adding search capabilities that will enable users to look inside the content of files encoded in Adobe’s Flash file format SWF….”

Source: The New York Times July 1, 2008

Optimized Flash Player makes SWF Flash file format searchable by Google, Yahoo engines

“Adobe Systems Inc. today announced that an optimized Adobe Flash Player will be added to the search engines of Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. under agreements with the two Internet firms. The tool will help the search engines better index dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIA) that include the Flash file format, or Shockwave Flash (SWF)….”

“…As a result of the partnership between the three firms, pre-existing Flash-based RIAs, including content that loads at runtime, will be searchable without alteration by companies or developers, Adobe said. Google has added the optimized Flash Player to its site already, and its search engine will be able to access SWF files as of today. Yahoo plans to add the technology to a future update of Yahoo Search. A schedule for adding the technology to Yahoo wasn’t disclosed…”

Source: Computerworld July 1, 2008

Google has a post on their Webmaster Central blog about this news also, Google learns to crawl Flash, . They have also started answering questions in another post, Improved Flash Indexing. Pay particular attention to the question regarding current technical limitations before you get too excited about this new feature.

So how does this effect web design houses and website owners?

In the past, it was difficult to get a website built using Flash® indexed in the search engines. If you do a Google search on the topic, you will find ways to attempt to get a flash based website indexed. Now it appears these methods will no longer be required in the future.

With this partnership, now websites using Flash® will be indexed better almost immediately according to the post at Google and in the future with Yahoo, per the quote above from Computerworld.

What does this mean to website owners?

Your website, if it uses Flash®, will be indexed easier in Google and Yahoo. Note that this partnership is with only 2 of the millions of search engines and directories available on the Net. Yes, these two feed information to other search engines and directories, but what about those who are not in partnership with or are fed by these search indexes?

This news only tackles one of the problems of using Flash® in a website. There are still the issues of the download speed, usability and accessibility of Flash® that need to be addressed when you hire a designer who wants to build your website using Flash®. A qualified designer can tackle all of these issues, but, will your return on investment justify the expense of hiring such a designer?

S. Emerson
Accrete Web Solutions

Google’s self-serving moralising can get rather tedious, and it seems to me, it has got worse, of late.

In this thoughtful article, Johon fires back, looking at how Google sucks value out of the sales channel, without permission:

“The monetization of the content involves controlling the distribution of the content, not just the distribution of the physical copies of the content. Competitive webmasters know that it is the search that engages the consumer. It is the search process that initiates transactions which yield dividends for all of the (authorized) players in the supply chain. The user searching for a book online reveals data about himself that has market value. The user clicking on clues in the process of finding a book online is initiating financial transactions along the way, as clicks are paid and links are bartered and ad impressions are delivered. Anyone publishing a free ebook can tell you that the value of that pursuit often exceeds the value of the actual ebook. And Google is taking that value out of the channel… without permission“.

Good or evil?

Ever since Matt Cutts ostensibly went on the war path against paid links, I seem to have the same conversation on a daily basis, about paid links.

(more…)

Well, sort of. More of a marketing exercise:

“Google for the first time began disclosing the number of times a business’s listings on Google Maps has been clicked upon. A Google Maps listing, which is free, is a thumbtack-shaped icon pointing to a business’s location on an online map. Clicking on the icon yields contact information and other details

Google began telling a select few advertisers the exact number of times that their advertisement showed up in search results every month. Google has never before used exact numbers to represent this kind of data.

Google began making it easier to determine the popularity of approximately 4,000 software programs it offers to personalize Web pages. These programs, otherwise known as “widgets,” range from a dictionary to daily bible quotes, and are provided by companies outside of Google….56% of Google’s widgets are inspected 500 or more times a week, and that nearly one in 10 of the widgets weren’t actually available”

Google Widgets can be found here.

Just how big is your brain, really?

Oh, they’re engaging in sophistry, but fooling no one. Google Apps “Grow Up” and the target is obvious.

It’s almost like they just kinda stumbled on Gmail as a “cool idea”. Then another cool idea was to make a few company purchases. Then another cool idea was to, oh, build some complementary apps such as Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Spreadsheets, Docs and then, like, bundle them all up. That would be cool. Unlike Office, which isn’t cool, and there’s no way anyone could possibly confuse the two.

Today, Google announce the next “cool, grassroots, off-the-cuff idea”:

“Google Apps Premier Edition is a new version designed to take on all the challenges presented by businesses with complex IT needs. For $50 per account per year, you get the whole Google Apps package plus many new business-oriented features, including access to our APIs and partner solutions (so it’s easy to integrate with existing systems), conference room scheduling for Calendar, 10GB of inbox storage, extended business hours phone support, and mobile access to your email on BlackBerry devices (just in case you can’t get enough at the office). Already, companies big and small, like Procter & Gamble, General Electric Corporation, Prudential, and SF Bay Pediatrics, are talking about how this new version of Google Apps makes it easy to offer low-cost communication and collaboration tools to all their employees so they can get on with what they do best.”

$50?!? Now that’s disruptive!

Will Google make any money out of it? Hard to see how. Will advertising work in this environment? I doubt it. Will it punch an enormous hole in Microsofts Office revenue stream?

That’s the interesting bit…

It’s obvious, but doesn’t get said much: Google is the platform. Not a platform, not a site, but THE web platform.
Excellent observations by Rich Skrenta.

“ Google has won both the online search and advertising markets. They hold a considerable technological lead, both with algorithms as well as their astonishing web-scale computing platform. Beyond this, however, network effects around their industry position and brand will prevent any competitor from capturing market share from them — even if it were possible to match their technology platform“

“Google’s next step: owning the rest of the page views on the net Just as Microsoft used their platform monopoly to push into vertical apps, expect Google to continue to push into lucrative destination verticals — shopping searches, finance, photos, mail, social media, etc. They are being haphazard about this now but will likely refine their thinking and execution over time. It’s actually not inconceivable that they could eventually own all of the destination page views too. Crazy as it sounds, it’s conceivable that they could actually end up owning the entire net, or most of what counts.“

News.com:

“We have some people at Google (who) are really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale, Page said to a packed Hilton ballroom of scientists. “It’s not as far off as people think.“

I’m not sure how far off we think AI is…

From RoughType:

“North Carolina’s Senate Finance Committee is hastily arranging hearings on the state’s use of tax incentives to lure businesses, as public outrage mounts over disclosures that Google was granted as much as a quarter billion dollars in secret tax breaks for a plant expected to employ approximately 200 workers. There’s no word yet on whether any Google officials will be asked to testify”

Ouch! A fair bit of scandal from various sources…

I was chatting with John, who was telling me about an ex-client of his.

The client had a site re-design, and had done a lot of link building, but wasn’t ranking anywhere. His site wasn’t even listed in Google. Was the site banned? On inspection, John found the designer had put a robots.txt file on the site blocking all robots. Simple mistake, but difficult to spot if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

If your site is not being crawled by Google, or other search engines, here’s a simple checklist to follow:

• Robots.txt may exclude spiders: check to see if you have a file called robots.txt. This can appear in any directory, but is usually found in the root. Either remove the robots.txt, or make sure it conforms to the following robots.txt standard.
• No inbound links: Search engines crawl the web, following links from page to page. If you don’t have a link pointing to your page from a page that is already included in Google, it is less likely that Google will find your site. Submit your site to a directory, ask a friend for a link, or beg, borrow or buy. It pays to get links from reliable sources, as opposed to link farms, which Google may discount.
• Site may have technical issues: The server may be setup incorrectly, your site may contain code that makes crawling difficult, etc. Luckily, Google offers a report tool in the form of Webmaster Central. Use Sitemaps and the Site Status Wizard to help determine potential problems.
• No deep crawl - Google crawls the site, but doesn’t find many pages. Check your linking structures to ensure that important pages are well linked. You may wish to use a pyramid site structure to help organize your site thematically. Remove, or alter, duplicate content. Increase the quality of inbound linking, and avoid poor quality outbound linking. See Matt Cutts comments roughly 3/4’s of the way down.
• Flash, Scripting - Google can have problems following animated and coded links. It is safest to provide an all HTML version of your site if using Flash. Google is getting a lot better at following scripted links, however be sure to check with Webmaster Central if problems persist.
• Site Ban - It’s unlikely, but possible, that your site may have been banned. Check with Webmaster Central, and if a ban is in place, try submitting a re-inclusion request. Here’s the definitive guide on submitting a reinclusion request, straight from the horses mouth. Essentially, Google want to know that the problem has been corrected, and it won’t happen again.

Resources:

• Google Webmaster Help Central FAQ
• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Is your site search engine friendly?
• Spider Simulator
• Critical Components Of Optimizing A Site