August 8th, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
You have to hand it to Google, they never miss an opportunity to smack their logo on an event, holiday, or goofy idea. Since the Olympics are here, this is as good of a time as any to do just that once again, regardless of the problems and pitfalls that Google has faced in China both in regards to privacy and human rights as well as just doing successful business in China.
Google is by no means the dominant search engine in China. They only have about 25% of the search market there, the rest goes to a local search engine that dominates the land of MP3 players mass produced by 1+ billion citizens with more than 60% of search.
July 28th, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
I routinely run into questions about setting up 301 Redirects in situations that I have not encountered yet. When I run into these new challenges, I do a quick Google search and never find the same answer twice about 301 Redirects.
That said, today I had a quick refresher question about the SEO benefits of 301 redirects relating to pushing a www site to a non-www site (Canonical Situations).
I came across this excellent article at SEO-Consultant-Services.co.uk which answered the questions I was looking for and it also answered the typical questions that most people ask when they are looking for 301 redirect solutions. I have come across a number of similar articles on 301 Redirects in the past, but this one was easy to understand, easy to implement, and very comprehensive in covering all of those 301 Redirect tangents that will eventually confront a web site owner.
http://www.seo-consultant-services.co.uk/301-redirects-www-non-www-canonical-problems.html
I have no relationship to this site, they do not sponsor me in any way, but I would highly recommend web site owners to bookmark this link. You are going to need it someday, and Google as good as they are sometimes, rarely returns a reliable result on 301 redirects!
Note, the CSS was a little hosed up on this site when I visited. I’d guess that they updated the theme and did not check this older article on the new theme. Regardless the content is good. I prefer things to look good, but I’ll take great content any day.
July 1st, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
Google and Yahoo! are both turning their search engines on with the ability to search through Adobe’s Flash file content. Websites that are built with flash components or rich internet applications will now yield up their content to Google and Yahoo! for indexing and listing in SERP’s.
“End users will be getting more accurate search results because there’s a lot of information in SWF files that will now be fully indexed, including more information in Rich Internet Applications (RIAs),” said Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for Adobe Flash Player, Platform BU.
“And content producers are now able to put Flash files online and know that they’re going to bring more users through organic search. The good thing is that they don’t have to do anything to enable this capability it works on any SWF file,” Everett-Church told Macworld. - NYTimes
Flash has historically been criticized for two primary reasons. The first reason is the over use of flash introduction pages that are used by advertisers covering everything from new cars, to consumer electronics to super models popping eca stack pills before getting air brushed within even thinner, longer images. Those intro pages are notoriously ignored and the ’skip intro’ button is one of the popularly pushed buttons on the internet.
However, there is a great deal of flash web content that looks similar to existing web pages, providing useful displays of text and video and navigational buttons that before now search engines literally turned a blind eye towards.
So now that the blind eye has been corrected for search engine vision, it will be interesting to see the shift in search engine results that will take place as Google and Yahoo! attempt to determine if the Flash is really important or whether or not it is a Flash in the pan deserving yet another intro skip.
