Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted this interesting video presentation featuring Matt Cutts (head of Google’s webspam team), in which he explains in detail a typical search result. At first I thought this is pretty much a basic explanation for those still not familiar with the way Google shows results, but I discovered this video is actually very useful even for those more experienced, if you know how to listen that is. I like the part about snippets and the additional info within it and how they capture that info from a web page.

Here’s the link to the post. This video is the first of more to come in the future.

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Which blogging platform do you use? If you’re using WordPress, like I do, than it would be useful to know some tips on how to make sure your blog content is more visible to the search engines. Joost de Valk wrote an interesting post on his blog discussing things to do to make your WP blog more SEO friendly. These are the tips discussed:

• Improve your titles, meta descriptions, and “more” texts
• Pick the correct permalink structure and slug
• Improve your template
• Remove duplicate content
• Interlink related posts
• Create linkable content!

Read in more detail on his blog. I especially liked the remove duplicate content advice. It seems simple enough, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a great portion of bloggers ignore duplicate content on their blog because of lack of understanding the way WordPress creates categories. Joost aims to continue this post with another one discussing the next step in WordPress SEO, so there will be more tips coming our way.

The fact that these are WordPress tips doesn’t mean they are not useful for other blogging platforms. On the contrary, almost all tips discussed can be implemented on blogs powered by different blogging software.

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Content presented through Flash is always inferior to content presented through standard xHTML regarding search engine indexing and ranking. Search engines like and are able to index content in textual form. Flash has always had this drawback, since its content is compiled within the SWF file and is thus unavailable to search engines. There are methods for bypassing this problem, most common being parallel xHTML and Flash content, where the actual indexable content is shown inside the source code of the page formatted using standard xHMTL, while it’s visually presented through Flash to the website visitor. The search engine sees the source and indexes it, while visitors get the benefit of rich visual presentation from Flash. Theoretically, as long as the content presented through both methods is coherent (similar/same), search engines will not give you any trouble. I read a post on Ajaxian today about what’s possibly a break through regarding the Flash content indexing problem.

SWFAddress, a developer library made by Asual, makes it possible to do deep linking within Flash content, or in other words it is possible to link to specific state of a Flash object on a page. There are plenty of example on Asual.com, so I won’t go into too much detail here, except to emphasize the SEO example which shows how SWFAddress helps developers get their Flash content indexed by search engines. The address is formed in a specific way, which with the help of the library, gets interpreted by the application, and returns the appropriate content which is embedded somewhere inside the Flash object. The example URL is:
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/
Within it, there is the “portfolio” subsection which in turn has its own subcontent, for example subcontent “1″:
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/#/portfolio/1/?desc=true&year=2001

I am not sure, but I suppose the URL tail (#/portfolio/1/?desc=true&year=2001) gets passed as parameters to the application residing under “/seo” with the usage of mod_rewrite, and according to these parameters the application serves the proper state of the Flash object, this time pertaining to Portfolio number 1. Although the URL could have been formed a bit better, like:
http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/samples/seo/#/portfolio/1/desc-true-year-2001
for example, to avoid passing of parameters within the URL, which search engines, although getting better at, don’t really like to parse that much, the whole thing works well. Asual give search engine search examples with these pages indexed and shown in search results. So, it works. This is great news, since the Flash content indexing issue has bothered developers for a long time, and has prevented some interesting and informative sites from getting indexed by the search engines.

Head on over to Asual.com and take a look at the examples (and there are plenty of them for different technologies).

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Microsoft has delivered on the announcement given in late August about opening Webmaster Portal (Center) to the public. The service is now live and available for general public at this address - webmaster.live.com . The official name is Live Search Webmaster Center.

Users are asked to authenticate administration rights for the sites listed in their account by uploading a specially created XML file or by inserting a tag in the META tags portion of the page code. Uploading the XML file seems like a much better solution in my opinion - easier and you don’t have to mess with changing page code.

Additionally, this post on the Live Search Official Blog invites everyone to visit the newly started Live Search Webmaster Center Blog for information and discussions about the new portal.

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This may seem obvious, but RSS feeds are a great way to get links to your site. In fact most sites don’t allow other sites to show their content feeds as part of their copyright policy. Bill Hartzer disagrees and shows why we should encourage other sites to feature content from our RSS feeds. Feeds are in fact a great resource for getting links. A great post with good advice on how to make the most of your site content.

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Skribit is a new site with a fairly simple goal in mind - to help bloggers know which topics their visitors are interested in. They offer a small widget that, when embedded into a website, will allow visitors to describe in short what they want to read about. This way, a blog can easily concentrate on topics the visitors are interested in instead of wasting time and resources writing about stuff that users simply don’t want to see. All submitted topics are voted on on Skribit (they call this “What’s hoppin”).

Since the site is currently in beta, the widget, which is the core of the service, is unavailable to the general public but you can contact Skribit and ask to be informed about the public release of the widget. Skribit may prove to be very useful, both for the readers (content consumers) and webmasters. Kind of like analyzing search keywords the visitor used to come to your site and trying to guess the visitor’s intent from them, only this is easier because having gone through the widget, the intent is quite clear - they want to see content about this or that particular topic. I’ve signed-up to be contacted for the public release, and will give Skribit a try for sure. I am especially interested in seeing whether this kind of communication with blog readers is in line with other methods of website traffic and content demand analysis. If that indeed proves to be the case, than things will get so much easier.

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There’s been a lot going on in the past days regarding PageRank changes. Google has decided to follow through on their promise to combat paid links and sites selling links. The main effect is a significant drop in PageRank, which is probably a way to reduce value for paid links (if they indeed are sold solely on the basis of high PageRank) and discourage webmasters to purchase links, although there seems to be no changes regarding anchor text. Google has done a few things to stir things up and many are suffering. It seems that not only sites with paid links have been affected. There is also speculation that Google is also hitting on sites with excessive cross-linking, although they may simply be reducing the value of certain groups of links. With every major change such as this, the innocent are bound to get burned as well. Some sites have experienced drops and other negative changes even without having bought or sold links, while others who engage in these practices have not been affected at all. Indeed, there are surprises in this Google update. Many of the sites that were affected are well known and popular authority sites in their own content category.

Google has flexed some muscle, and the effect is pulsating across the Web. Sites that depend solely on traffic sent by Google are definitely going to feel the change. Sites that did nothing wrong, but were still affected, should work on broadening their promotion efforts to include other sources of traffic such as social networks, community sites and other search engines. If a site depends solely on Google for traffic than a major change like this will definitely have a very negative effect on site and business performance. Good news is that, so far, there seems to be little change in traffic, although if changes prove to be related to overall ranking as well, changes in traffic will probably happen.

This blog was PageRank 0 until yesterday, now it’s PR 2 (at the time of writing, who knows about tomorrow). BTW, it was PR 2 a couple of weeks ago, for about two days. Was that the beginning of this PageRank update and I missed it? What I’m trying to illustrate is that pagerank obsession is a waste of time, unless you sell links based on this criterion.

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Amit from Digital Inspiration shared some statistics about Facebook Flyer campaigns. The numbers could be better, although as some of the comments pointed out, the number of impressions and clicks may be a little too small for any conclusive analysis. Anyway, according to the data shown, Facebook Flyers could do better click-through rate and conversion wise. A 0.6% click through rate on CPC based flyers (FB Flyers Pro) is hardly impressive. For a targeted user group, these ads should do much better. Are you using Facebook Flyers as part of your online marketing efforts? What kind of numbers are you getting?

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Google shows what it calls sitelinks for certain queries, and then only for some sites or domains. They appear below the first result on the results page (usually a domain name that contains most or all the keywords from the query), and represent shortcuts to specific content on that site that Google thinks may help you get to the information you need quicker than by manually navigating the site.

Where is the added value? Well, if you own a nice generic domain name that may collect a fare amount of type in traffic, having additional sitelinks show up on a Google search page can only increase the possibility that a visitor will actually end up on your site. Sitelinks, even though claimed by Google as automatically generated by the search algorithm (or see below), give an image of authority for a domain name. So the value of a generic domain name, with the appropriate content on the site and a nice amount of traffic, is increased even further for having additional exposure on Google, which most probably means more traffic. If you were to sell your domain name (and website), which incidentally has sitelinks showing up in Google, you’d probably get a little extra cash for the added value. Ok, that’s great, but what if sitelinks don’t appear for your site?

Bookworm SEO posted an interesting post about his attempt to do research on Google sitelinks on his blog. In this Part 1 of his research post series, he gives a list of 100 sites that Google sitelinks show up for. Sounds interesting, and I’m looking forward to see if he actually comes up with definitive results. I suppose Google will also be interested in seeing this, although I doubt they’ll acknowledge his results should they prove to be valid.

In the meantime, this is what Google says about sitelinks in Webmaster Guidelines:

The links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

You can aslo see this on Google Webmaster Guidelines.

For now, webmasters can tell Google not to show sitelinks for their site through the Webmaster Tools dashboard, and that sums up all the control webmasters have over sitelinks.

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It seems Facebook is continuing to open its content for the general public. After making user profiles visible to the general public (and search engines), Facebook applications will soon be available also, or rather the about pages for applications. These application about pages will be visible to the search engines which means that users will be able to use search engines to find Facebook apps. Logged out users will be able to read reviews and discussion boards so they can get the full picture of what the application has to offer. Privacy will be respected, so the pages will only show first names for all users, and profile pictures only if the user/developer has allowed this in their private security settings. Users who are not logged in on Facebook will only be able to view content on the about pages.

According to the post on Facebook Developers, the goal of this changes is to make developers’ applications more visible to the public so users can find applications they love using, and gain more potential users who’ll try the apps. Application about pages should appear in the search results of search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Live and ASK in the next couple of days.

I am not sure visitors will search applications “they love using” on search engines. If they love using them, it’s probably because they already use Facebook regularly. Do they really need to look for Facebook applications in places other than Facebook? The new change will be more beneficial in terms of search engine marketing (SEO in particular). The developer company or individual developer will benefit by getting found on the search engine through such an authoritative site or page. A link from the about page to another site (developer’s blog or home site) would be very valuable in that case. With Google (working on its own social network) and other search engines making attempts on getting more exposure on Facebook, the “SE visible” application about pages are about to take on a very significant role. Developing applications and a presence on Facebook is becoming an important Internet marketing ingredient for companies, and as such an important part of SEO in the future.

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