beu blog

First reported by AussieWebmaster and jkwilson, Google will soon add “load time” to their list of criteria for Google’s AdWords Quality Score. In a new version of the Google AdWords FAQ posted prematurely by accident and then removed late Wednesday Google said:

“Beginning in February 2008, you’ll be able to see a grade for your website’s load time in your AdWords account. ‘Load time’ refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to arrive at your functional landing page after clicking your ad. Several weeks after your load time grade becomes visible, it will begin to impact your landing page quality and, therefore, your Quality Score. We recommend working to improve your load time during this interim if it’s received a low score.”

All this talk of website load time made me wonder if Google had updated what it considers a “reasonable” amount of time for a page to load. According to the AdWords learning center 4 seconds still seems to be Google’s standard.“Make sure your page loads quickly — under four seconds if possible. Slow load times deter visitors from staying. “
- http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/text/19428.html

So, what sites will be the most negatively impacted? Obviously sites that take the longest time to load. And what sites take the longest to load? One word, FLASH! If you have an all Flash site I would consider steps to speed things up and quick. In addition I would consider limited use of Flash as well as increasing content in HTML. Hmmm… I feel like I’ve said that before oh yeah, I have. : )

Either way, as I said at SearchEngineWatch.com:

“Interesting that load time is now part of quality score since the factor has always been important at Google. After all, load time is one reason why Google’s homepage seems so simple. I understand that in the early days, Larry was known to count the number of words on Google’s home page daily as well as to check it’s speed using a stopwatch. In fact the content at the bottom of the page was added after early user testing because participants sat waiting for the rest of the page to load….

Oh well sorry for the history lesson, I’m a little surprised it’s taken this long to be added or “officially” at least. Either way I think this step is great for users.”

- beu

Sites claiming to offer a new, innovative solution for “Flash SEO” called SWFAddress aka “Deep Links”, “Deep Linking” and/or other. Unfortunately, these sites are promoting techniques based on SWFAddress which is a method for Flash SEO that I’ve blogged about, taken the creator to task on and that even he admits, is sub-optimal in terms of SEO!

“The case is valid. Deep links with anchors published on other sites will tell Google to index the start page.”
- Google Groups

Not to worry though because identifying sites using SWFAddress is easy! If a Flash site uses #anchors (a pound sign) in it’s URLs chances are it’s using SWFAddress. The problem with this SWFAddress is that it functions in only one direction, or so to speak.

Google ignores the #anchor in SWFAddress URLs as well as the entire path following the #anchor in URL. When users with Flash cut and paste a link from their address bar into their blog, digg and/or Linkedin, Google ignores everything starting with the #anchor and as a result misallocates keyword relevancy and PageRank to the “start page”.

Some credit where it’s due would have been nice but, either way I commend the good folks at Asual for their efforts as well as the new “COPY LINK TO CLIPBOARD” link in the footer of there SEO sample pages.

As you know I’m always looking for ways to help Flash developers make content accessible to search engines. Today I received a link to a site claiming to have the answer to that age old question, “How to SEO Flash”?

The site claims to have a sample of “SEO SWFAddress 2.0″ code that “provides a better separation between the content and the presentation.” Better than what I’m not sure! Either way, the urls in the “SEO sample” still contain #anchors. Googlebot ignores #anchors in URLs and I’m really hoping “SWFObject 2.0″ isn’t based around such a myth!

A good example of this is Google’s cache of “SEO Sample” portfolio 2.
Here is what the user sees:
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/#/portfolio/2/?desc=true

As you can see the two pages are different and that is called cloaking!

- Sample from SWFAddress 2.0 Website