The SEO Blog

Last year Google announced that they would be able to index Flash, but nothing really came of it. Flash, in my opinion, is problematic from a search perspective. Google is now announcing that they have added external resource loading to their Flash capabilities. If the Flash content pulls information in from an external file like an XML, HTML, or text file, Google will be able to index that content and make the relationship between it and the original Flash file.

Here are the capabilities Google says it has for indexing Flash:

• Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.
• Discover links within Flash files.
• Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.
• Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.
• Index sites scripted with AS1 and AS2, even if the ActionScript is obfuscated. Update on June 19, 2009: We index sites with AS3 as well. The ActionScript version isn’t particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest.

Google has different search engines for different countries across the world. One of their search engines, Google Japan, was caught buying links! For awhile now, Google has been trying to tell people that buying links is bad (not saying it isn’t) but then they do it themselves through paid reviews.

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land asks:

How are ordinary web sites to be expected to know the “rules” about what they can or cannot do?

He brings up a great point. Being in the SEO industry, it is easy to overlook the fact that regular website owners may not have a clue that Google even has rules to follow. They could consider buying a link just part of online advertising, something that just can be done on the internet. Its almost like they picked up the phone and put their ad in the yellow pages. I just have to laugh when I see something like this.

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Marketing Pilgrim
Search Engine Land

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t search online for local news; however, I know some that do it consistently and there are search volume numbers to prove it (below taken from Google’s free keyword tool):

Last week, I wrote a quick post about Fox 8 getting a new domain and noticed a few other things as well. I’m definitely not picking on Fox 8 - I watch their 10 o’clock news every weeknight - it’s great! Since this is my news station, I’m rooting for them to get into the SEO game and knock some of the other Cleveland news competitors out of the top spots in Google’s rankings.

Currently, the biggest online competitors for www.fox8.com are: www.newsnet5.com, www.cleveland.com, www.wkyc.com and www.woio.com. Below illustrates how www.fox8.com stacks up to their competitors for some targeted keywords…

Fox8.com just needs some aggressive SEO-love to compete online with these other stations -   nothing that link building,  search engine optimization & traditional marketing couldn’t fix!

What does the shady mortgage company Countrywide and Google have in common? Both of these companies have lost the trust factor. The Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe have published a list of the top 20 most trusted companies and Google, like Countrywide has fallen off the list. The article says the following:

The Ponemon Institute got 6,500 people - weighted by age, gender and household income to match the U.S. census - to name the five companies they trusted most and least.

Concern about privacy is higher than ever, the survey showed. Less than half of consumers - 45 percent - feel they have control over their personal information. That’s down from 48 percent last year and 56 percent in 2006.

More than 60 percent said identity theft negatively affects how they think about a company, and more than half get concerned when a company sends notifications of data breaches.

Personal information is both precious to the consumer but it is also sought after by the search engines and very aggressively by Google. XMCP at Slightly Shady SEO did a post last month titled “Google’s User Data Empire“.  In his post he outlines a bunch of Google’s services and how they can be used to track a user and gather information on them. The services he lists are as follows:

• Adsense
• Analytics
• GMail
• Chrome - Google’s internet browser, like Firefox and Internet Explorer
• Google Toolbar
• Android - Google’s mobile operating system

There are more than just the ones listed but these are some of the bigger services offered by Google. Think about the implications of these services. Google can potentially know where you are and what you are doing based on these services (Android can use Google Maps which can get your GPS location and log what you are searching for, Chinese food for lunch eh?). Google could then serve advertisiments to you based on this information. How much of this information will they give to their thir party advertisers when Google wants to dive deeper into behaviorial ads?

From an advertisers perspective this information is like gold. You know who your target audience is and you can then target it exactly with this type of information. There is a book, “Going Wireless” and in the book it talks about advertising and the mobile implications. Depending on device and personal settings, advertisers might be able to push ads to your handset. Imaging driving past Chipotle (one of my favortire restaurants by the way) and it is somewhere between 11 AM and 1 PM. How likely are you to stop if a promotional coupon for $1 off a burrito just got pushed to your Android powered phone? Heck, I would! Its lunch time and thats a pretty good deal. That could make or break my decision for lunch right there. I could have had Wendy’s on my mind but because I got that coupon, I’m now changing course. To me, thats awesome marketing because it delivers what I want, when I need it most.

It will be interesting to see where things go from here and how they continue to develop. Being in the SEO industry, it gives you an interesting perspective, because I’m not sure all the time which side of the fence I sit on. Do I want Google to offer these products to me free of charge but then be served targeted ads, or do I want my information kept from them so they don’t use it against me?

It’s been awhile since I provided a full rankings update - so before the end of the year, I wanted to be sure this was documented.

Its been over 7 months since we switched domains and believe it or not, we still haven’t 100% bounced back from this switch! The rankings below illustrate the Google ranking trends to-date; however, it is great to see that TKG.com is now ranking better for some phrases than prior to the domain switch (these rankings are bold below)

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond

I was going through some articles in my Google RSS Reader and Barry over at Search Engine Roundtable found that you can subscribe to Google search results via Google Alerts. This is awesome because you can not view search results kind of in real time as well as manage your online reputation better!

I had some existing alerts setup so I had to setup new ones to be able to get the alert subscriptions via RSS. Here are some quick instructions for those who don’t have alerts setup now or for those who want to subscribe through RSS instead:

1. Get a Google Account
2. Sign up for Google Alerts
3. Click “Manage Your Alerts”
4. Create a new alert as shown making sure to select feed as the delivery option instead of email.
5. Hit create alert and then you can subscribe via RSS

I’m exicted to play with these and see how they work out. It will be interesting to see the capabilities of Google RSS for search as it develops.

A month ago, I updated on our rankings in Google. Since we set the benchmark back in April, many Google rankings have fluctuated and by day 48, they were just about back to where they were before we switched domains; however, there were a few that were still not quite there at day 108.
Today, day 153, some rankings are back, some are still fluctuating & some are even better than before the switch! Below represents those rankings that weren’t back the last time I updated…

guest blogger: Megan Jeffery

I know that this blog is usually a great place to find tips on SEO, the latest news on our domain switch, and to find out what is happening in the Social Media world, but I thought this was a great place to discuss Google’s latest project. After all, what is Search Engine Optimization with out a search engine, especially one that has decided to build it’s own browser? If you haven’t heard already, today is the release date for Google’s much rumored new browser project - “Google Chrome”. Google’s “Chrome” is available for Windows only download sometime today.

According to Tech Crunch, Google introduced this project with a cartoon! If you would like to read some of the more technical aspects, Google Blogoscoped has some great information. The cartoon is now up on Google’s official blog. I read through it, and followed it for the most part, but I must admit, I am not a software engineer, and they officially lost me somewhere in the middle. So, let me just give you the aspects of this new browser that stuck in my mind. To me, one of the advantages of this browser will be that it will be more “application friendly”. Google wants this product to be able to seemlessly integrate the web applications users like most. The whole point behind building thier own browser seems to be that they feel that other browsers are old fashioned. They don’t work with video, games, chat, etc. as well as they should. Haven’t we all experienced the crash of a browser right in the middle of something important? This frustration will supposedly be remedied by the fact that Google Chrome will allow for each action inside the browser to have it’s own process. It will no longer require that one process finish before the user can begin a new one.

A few of the main features that I thought were interesting:

• The “Omnibox” (URL box) will have memory, so if you were looking at a particular page at some point, all you have to do is type a keyword from the page and it takes you back. The Omnibox also offers suggestions.
• Each tab has all it’s own unique functions, including the URL box.
• Because of the new technology Google has built, it is supposed to be FAST!
• The default page will show your nine most visited pages, and on the side show the site you search on the most, creating a personalized experience every time you open your browser.
• It has a privacy mode: the browser is in read only, when this feature is enabled nothing you are viewing is being saved in the history - such as when you are shopping for gifts for loved ones!
• Created a new way to discourage malware by “sandboxing” them - the browser will not allow writing files to your harddrive or reading of documents on your desktop.
• When you arrive at a possible phishing site, Google Chrome will alert you, as Google has built a database of “bad sites” and the browser will have the ability to alert you when you land on one.
• Google Chrome has incorporated “Gears”, an effort to make browsers better for developers, and increase all web standards.

These are just a few of the many new features Google Chrome is offering. I am sure many of you are wondering why Google would build it’s own browser when it essentially funds Firefox. According to Google, they want all browsers to be better, they want competition and creativity. They have taken ideas from other browsers, and hope that others will use thier ideas as well, so they have made the entire Google Chrome Project Open Source.

It’s been about 6 weeks since the last Google rankings update and things are still trending fairly well. The majority of the Google rankings we’re tracking have either increased or remained steady, with a few slightly dropping or not returning at all. Keep in mind that we haven’t actively been optimizing the site for these phrases over the last 3 months - so some of the dips may be due to not implementing SEO efforts into the site.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned that the number of pages Google was indexing had declined from 186 to 94… This decrease continued over the next week down to the mid-50’s! TKG.com’s Google saturation has been hovering around the mid-60’s for 2 weeks and is now at 62.

We’re checked robots.txt file, google webmaster tools, drop in rankings…

Wouldn’t it be great if Google reported what pages it was no longer indexing to make it easier to investigate the cause?
Rankings still seem to be up & so is traffic… So until those both plummet, we’re not going to stress too much; but we’ll still keep researching!