Google Fast Filp is the latest cool new application from a company known for innovation. Google Fast Flip lets users discover and share news articles online but in a more traditional way. Flip is s kind of like an online print publication only with pages you can turn. In order to make this all possible Google is scaning images of articles from it’s partner websites and then displaying them all in one easy to read place .
Innovation
Google Rich Snippet Tool
by Brian Ussery on August 31, 2009 | 
Back in May, Google introduced support for Rich Snippets in SERPs. These snippets can be extracted from structured data annotations provided to search engines via microformat or in RDFa embedded by webmasters. These structured data annotations can provide not only quality signals but also reviews, personal information, product details and even business contacts. Obviously, when this data appears in SERPs it’s going to have a direct impact on click-through rates. As a result perhaps, Google has launched a new tool for webmasters to preview Rich Snippets. The new Google Webmaster Rich Snippet Testing Tool according to Google, is to help webmasters enhance “search results by marking up web pages with Microformats or RDFa.” This kind of structured data could help improve the quality of SERPs and is already being used by sites like beu blog, Google Profiles, LinkedIn and others….
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| Rich Snippet SERP example |
Google Wave Operator Cheat Sheet
by Brian Ussery on June 3, 2009 |
Like Google, Google Wave uses advanced operators for it’s search functionality. Wave allows users options to search with advanced operators by Keyword, Status, Participant, Date, Folder, Attachment, Tag, Gadget, Expression, Phrase, XML, Wave ID, Inbox, Saved Searches, Filters and more. Earlier today, a “quick guide to the operators and restricts supported by wave search” was added to Google Wave user accounts.
Here is a screen shot of Google Wave’s advanced search operator cheat sheet:
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Google IO 2009
by Brian Ussery on May 27, 2009 |
I’m at Google I/O ( IO2009 ) this week checking out sessions, taking photos and Twazzuping thanks to App Engine via Twitter. Assuming all goes well, (AT&T 3g network is available) I’ll also be submitting articles a few other places. Really looking forward to a great week here in SFO. Be sure to say hello if you’re one of the 4,500 estimated attendees….
Adobe Flash SEO Critique
by Brian Ussery on April 18, 2009 |
While I commend Adobe for its recent efforts to help engines index textual content locked in Flash, I have issues with the new “SEO Technology Center.”
For example, the following video by one of Adobe’s Senior Technology Evangelists states that tv.adobe.com “…rises to the top of the heap in the Google…” for [Duanes World] thanks to Adobe’s new headless Flash player technology “Ichabod.” According to Adobe’s Evangelist, “Duane” could only be visible to Googlebot by having Ichabod change states in the Flash file, therefore exposing “Duane” as textual content. Unfortunately this is not correct as the cached version of the page from Google’s SERP states “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page“.
As shown in the Google SERP, “Duane” appears to Googlebot only in links pointing at tv.adobe.com and not in the Flash file as the video claims. Using the advanced “site:” operator to search for [Duane] within tv.adobe.com shows a number of pages with links pointing to AdobeTV using “Duane” as anchor text. Because these links use #anchors (fragment identifiers) which Googlebot ignores, in URLs, Google “credits” keyword relevancy to the root instead of the intended target URL.
As a result of this misallocation, tv.adobe.com ranks for [Duanes World]. Just as keyword relevancy is being misallocated in this case, so is PageRank as illustrated by the URL PR9 when compared with the Flash PR8. In fact, the SERP TITLE and snippet aren’t from AdobeTV but rather DMOZ. To see this compare “Adobe TV” as seen in the SERP with “AdobeTV” seen on the page by users with Flash and JavaScript enabled. This is due to AdobeTV’s use of dynamic JavaScript TITLE elements in (X)HTML.
With on page factors out of the way, as a side note it’s also worth mentioning that the search engine results page in Adobe’s video is based on the user’s prior search history, while logged into a Google Account and Searchwiki appears to be activated. These personalization settings can all act to throw off the data in such an experiment.
This post isn’t intended to bash Adobe but rather to point out some critical errors in their research. Please don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of Adobe and have been for years. I think they make great products and appreciate all of the hard work done by Adobe’s team of Evangelists. I understand that Adobe Evangelists are experts at Flash but, when it comes to SEO for Flash and interpreting Google SERPs, wish people wouldn’t take their opinions blindly as being fact.
For the handful of us with expertise in SEO for Flash, it’s a little awkward having to tell clients that Adobe’s information isn’t entirely correct. Either way, it would be nice to see more research as well as accurate and up-to-date information in Adobe’s SEO Technology Center. It would also be great to see some of these best practices implemented at tv.adobe.com.