This morning we reported that the comments on Facebook are being indexed by Google. Google's Matt Cutts just confirmed on Twitter that Google is now able to "execute AJAX/JS to index some dynamic comments." This gives Google's spider, GoogleBot, the ability to read comments in AJAX or JavaScript, such as Facebook comments or Disqus comments and others that are dynamically loaded via AJAX or JavaScript. In addition, this means, Google is better at seeing the content behind more of your JavaScript or AJAX. Postscript: Google now has an official blog post up with more details. Related [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | SEO: Blocking Spiders | SEO: Flash | Top News

The Google Webmaster Central Blog posted an update on their Flash indexing capabilities. Google said, as of today, they are able to index and understand "almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site." Typically, Flash has been one of those big No-Nos in the SEO space. I still do not believe any SEO would recommend anyone to build out a site completely built in Flash. However, there are many Flash sites out there that are not concerned with being indexed, either intentionally or not intentionally, but Google wants to index them. Google has been working w [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | SEO: Flash | Top News

The Google Webmaster Central blog finally blogged Google is now indexing the content of files that some SWF files load externally, technically from "external resource loading". Flash often loads external files to generate what you see in the SWF, so if the SWF is calling an external HTML, XML, another SWF, etc files, Google will index it. Vanessa's coverage of the Google I/O event also covers this from a couple weeks back. The example given by Google on how this improves the search results is by showing a search snippet for the query [2002 VW Transporter 888]. In the past, Google would n [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | SEO: Flash

This week at Google I/O, Google talked a lot about the evolution of the technological capabilities of the web. HTML 5 is ushering in new era of browser-based development and applications. Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, kicked things off with, "My message to you is that this is the beginning of the real win of cloud computing, of applications, of the internet, which is changing the paradigm that we’ve all grown up with so that it just works … regardless of platform or hardware you’re using." Which is great and all, but if "the web has won", as Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering at Google procl [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Features: Analysis | Google: APIs | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central | SEO: Flash | Top News

Much was made earlier this year of Google's announcement that they've improved the indexing of Flash content. For years, search marketers have warned against building sites in Flash because they weren't able to be indexed by major search engines; an all-Flash site was a kiss of death where SEO is concerned. More than three months after Google's announcement, has anything really changed? That's the question Atlanta-based SEO Brian Ussery recently set out to answer. After conducting several case studies, Brian published the results in an article titled 2009 Google Flash SEO. Here's a b [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | SEO: Flash

Historically, search engines have been unable to extract content, such as text and links, from Flash (SWF) files. Subsequently, much of the Flash-based content on the web has been unavailable in search results. This situation has been frustrating for web developers, who have tried to come up with workarounds to help get search engines to index and rank their Flash pages. This situation hasn't been ideal for searchers either, as this limitation has kept them from seeing potentially great matches for their queries because they've been locked away in Flash files. According to Adobe and Google, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | SEO: Flash

For a long time there has been a tug of war between developers and designers who love to use Flash and SEOs who know how bad Flash can be from a search engine crawler perspective. The designer wants the beauty of an all Flash site. The SEO wants to bring the site traffic. It's a tough situation, but there are ways to implement Flash and still provide something for the crawlers to chew on. Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) sIFR is a technique that uses Javascript to read in HTML text and render it in Flash instead. The essential fact to focus on here is that the method guarantees [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | SEO: Flash

Wouldn't it be great if all those whiz-bang Web 2.0 interactive elements based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Flash—such as widgets and gadgets and Google Maps mashups— were search engine optimal? Unfortunately, that's not the case. In fact, these technologies are inherently unfriendly to search engine spiders. So, if you intend to harness Web 2.0 technologies for wider syndication, increased conversion, improved usability and greater customer engagement, you'd better read on or you'll end up missing the boat when it comes to better search engine rankings. When [...]

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If there's anything I particularly hate when it comes to SEO, it's the meta keywords tag. I so wish it had never been invented. It's practically useless, yet people still obsess over it. In this article, I'll explain more about why you shouldn't worry about it except perhaps for misspellings, as well as which search engines support it. The meta keywords tag is one of several of meta tags that you can insert into your web pages to provide search engines with information about your pages that isn't visible on the page itself. For example, my Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages [...]

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Call me Mr. Rain On The Parade, but after reading an interview in The Guardian with Google product manager of crawl services Dan Crow, I can't help but feel people are going to come away with the mistaken idea that Google will magically make their Flash content suddenly more accessible to Google's crawlers. That ain't going to happen. Interview: Google's Dan Crow is the article, and in it, we're told: If we hit a web page with a Flash movie on it, we just extract the text out of it and index that text. But a Flash movie is much richer than that. So one of the projects I'm working on is t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | SEO: Flash