It seems like Google is, for the time-being, experimenting with crowdsourced SERP personilization. Apparently, a select few are able to rank the listings that show up on a SERP through their Google account. Eventually, this will become a permanent application and when it does, it will be interesting to see how this affects SEO efforts.
Late Monday evening Google announced they have the ability to better index Flash websites. The ability was made possible by integrating Adobe’s Flash player technology with their Flash indexing algorithm.
Google users can expect to find more relevant and dynamic Web results in Search Engines that were previously undiscoverable by spiders due to their Flash nature.
Adobe has also indicated their technology was made available to Yahoo! as well.
For a more in depth perspective on the impact of crawled and indexed Flash pages, read Search Engine Land’s article here.
Google Maps has added a More tab to enhance a users expererience. If you click on the More tab on Google Maps, you now have access to geo-tagged videos, pictures and Wikipedia references. I had a chance to check it out for a few minutes and it is a pretty cool feature, however it was very slow when I used it. This got me thinking a little- if someone is using Google Maps, they are probably just looking for simple, fast directions; not clutterred, time-consuming directions. Knowing Google, I’m certain they will streamline to provide consumers with what they need quicker.
Yahoo! appears to be heading in the right direction when it comes to regaining market share from Google. They have taken their Advanced Search setting a step further and have now developed Personalized Search. The Personalized Search collects information about a searcher’s interests from their search history, browsing history, and interests listed in profiles from websites such as MySpace and other social networks. In doing so, it eases the users experience by narrowing the searches.
Mahalo.com’s Jason Calacanis had a candid conversation with a packed ballroom and moderator Kevin Ryan. The house may have had search marketers of all kinds, but I suspect SEOs could have been there in high numbers due to the perceived history of SEO bashing on Calacanis’s part. He began by clearing the air as he clarified that his past SEO remarks were directed at black even grey hat tacticians and proclaimed to be a Search Engine Optimizer himself, if making friendly content defined the practice. (more…)
Last November, Google opened up Google Maps to community editing, allowing registered users to move around the pushpins where businesses were located in attempts to improve the accuracy of local business information. Yesterday, Google took this a step further and is now letting registered users update/change location information (address, city, phone number…etc.), as well as ADD new business information. Do you have to be the business owner to do this? Google says no. ANYONE can edit this information. But you have to be registered, and since everything is recorded, malicious competitors (who want to switch phone numbers or listings) will be caught if anything is altered under a false pretense. Google also announced that once a business is “claimed” by a business owner, it cannot be edited.
Yahoo recently introduced the ‘robot-no content’ tag which allows users to specify what content they do not want the search engine spiders to crawl due to irrelevance. This ensures that the search engine crawler will only look at relevant information. This will help bridge the gap of having a website that caters to users or search engines. With this content filtering, it could be possible to have a website that does both. This new concept will help webmasters in optimizing their sites better. Sometimes, there’s content on the site that isn’t quite relevant to the main content of the site; for instance, privacy statements, mission statements, terms and conditions, etc. Instead, you can get the Yahoo search engine crawler to only look at the content in which you would want them to by applying this ‘robot-no content’ tag to certain parts of the page that indicate to Yahoo’s search engine crawler what parts of the page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful to visitors.
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