It used to be that, if you hoped Google would index a PDF file, you had to create a PDF that was text-based, not image-based; Googlebot couldn’t recognize the content of scanned or image-based documents. According to an announcement today, that’s no longer the case. Google says it’s now using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology […]
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 […]
The Google News blog has an excellent post on the truths and myths of how Google News works. Here is the short version:
Google Artificially Promotes Recent Web Pages from Google Operating System reports that Google has been recently showing a bit too much love to new or very recent pages indexed by Google. Ionut’s Alex Chitu’s example was that Google’s New Years logo promoted a search for January 1 tcp/ip, which then showed results for Digg and […]
For over a decade, search engines have supported standards allowing you to prevent pages from being spidered or included within a search index. Today, Yahoo now supports a new twist — a way to flag that part of your page shouldn’t be included in an index. It’s called the robots-nocontent tag. Many search marketers have […]
Back in 2005, SEOmoz tried to assemble a list of all the possible search engine ranking factors out there and get various experts to rate them. I say tried to because while they had a list, and ratings, no one knows all the factors or exactly how each individual search engine chooses to use them. […]
Last week, I covered a new command for the meta robots tag — one to prevent search engines from using Yahoo titles and descriptions. In doing that, a number of questions came up about the meta robots tag syntax itself. Google Webmaster Central has now posted “Using the robots meta tag,” providing some clarity from […]
The Yahoo Search Blog just announced that Yahoo Site Explorer has new features. Yes, one of those features is the Yahoo Site Explorer Badge, which we reported this morning. But there are more features. You can now delete URLs from the index with a click of a button. If you authenticated your site with Yahoo […]
Google’s Matt Cutts has issued a weather report on Google indexing and ranking issues, which I’ll get into below. In addition, I’ll recap a number of Google concerns that I’ve noted over the past two or three weeks. I’ve been saving these to follow up on when I’m out at Google later this month. I’m […]
Have you ever tagged an image in Flickr, a link in Del.icio.us, a video in YouTube? Have you used tags in these systems to find similar pictures or pages or videos? Is tagging is taking indexing away from professional indexers, and putting it into the hands of amateurs. Have you used a tag to indicate […]