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My team didn't think that was the most important question right now. What we wanted to know was how Google indexes the links contained within Flash movies, becuase now that is confirmed we can start designing new ways to implement flash in the majority of usage cases which make the user and search engine experience better.
It was inevitable that we'd see these in the UK soon, however it's not clear from that photo that this one is definitely Google, although it does seem to match their camera setup as spotted in Milan in April: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3235/2421053600_35bacbc855.jpg
I got one of my guys to check it properly, and it certainly appears that Googles indexing of Flash has improved significantly. http://www.search-engine-war.co.uk/2008/07/flash-time-to-c.html
@ Ruud. If you read the Google information it clearly states that if you don't have text in a button object they wont be able to get any anchor text. Flip that around and it reads as if a button does have text they will be able to use it as anchor text.
Story: Scam or not: 1on40.com
It reads like it is a reverse billed PPC scam (hence - auction), posing as an SEO offer. Combined with a pyramid selling scheme this could be bad for companies that sign up.
It's a bit misleading to describe this as about numbers of 'words' because really it's about character counts and truncation points. Actually the behavior from Google looks pretty clear.
Look at the cache data of the results closely.
[Hob1h] > the cache clearly shows that Google indexed and highlighted the last search term in the title tag, but not specifically as title text.
[allintext: Hob1h] > Yep it has got it in the page text.
[allintitle: Hob1h] > Nope it has not treated as title text.
[allintitle: HoboL site:www.hobo-web.co.uk] > count through using the words from HoboJ to HoboN and you can see that the word 'HoboL' is actually the last word stored as part of the title field at Google, even though it has been truncated and dooesn't show in the results page, after that the rest aren't stored as part of the title but are definitely stored somewhere because we can search for any of them as in page text.
[allintitle: HoboN site:www.hobo-web.co.uk] > Nope
[allintext: HoboN site:www.hobo-web.co.uk] > Yes
This looks to indicate that after the limit at which the title itself truncates Google treats the overun as normal text in the page. Now I wonder how many more words you could actually get in there?
Even though it's severely malicious and potentially illegal it's not particularly new or sophisticated because it's easy to spot, and if he's just modifying the in page meta tags he could just as easily dropped nocache / noindex meta tags in there on a given date and achieved the same effect.
Likewise if he's using modified HTTP server headers which would be a bit more clever why go to the trouble of using x-robots which would be obvious. Again he could have just switched the HTTP server headers to 404 or 500 which will usually confuse the hell out of most site admins because the site will work and look perfect but their listings will disappear faster than a snowball in Hades - and yes I have seen this occur before but as a server administration mistake rather than to intentionally cause disruption, so it should be on your checklists anyway.
@Miriam
- for Meta Tags read the source code
- for HTTP headers you can use http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp or install HTTP Live Headers for Firefox. Also check out Google Webmaster Central for indexing issues, although I am not sure whether they have incorporated support for x-robots tags into the GWC reports yet? If not they better hurry up and do so.
I actually think this could be quite a disruptive change as it will suddenly alter the way massive volumes of link text are calculated. It will be interesting to see how much of a ripple it causes in the SERPs.
No. This is just a token jesture to confuse privacy advocates. If you read the small print the cookies reset the expiry date every time you visit Google, so theoretically they could make the length around 30 or 60 days without any serious reduction to their data. I reckon they choose 2 years to make it sound like this is connected to the main privacy issue of how long they save search and visitor data for.
From experience there seems like a very vast difference between independent/solo operators and SEM agency teams. I think that knowledge sharing within the agencies is much better, also they seem more client focused, where as individuals are as mentioned above usually focused on trying to bring in business or generate revenue via a number of means. I think you learn more and get to access to cooler tools as part of an agency.
Last summer I did a presentation about the future search and how the massive range of pure data based systems being a precursor to the 'semantic web' represented a significant change to our industry. So yes I agree SMB's that are not fast moving enough will lose out, because many are only just getting their heads around basic site level SEO let alone the range of other types of media they should be optimizing and data feeds they need to think about creating. Peter Norvig (head of Google engineering) had a great quote where he described webmasters, I believe as, "incompetent" in a discussion with Tim Berners Lee over the semantic web, because they could barely write decent code let alone get their heads around more advanced concepts, so no matter how wonderful the services provided by the search engines might be they are in danger of being to far advanced for their market, SMBs and most webmasters.
"We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML. It's hard for them to go to the next step." - Peter Norvig
Need I say more.
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Story: Experimental Proof. Google Can Index Links in Flash!