The End of SWF-SEO nightmare? Google indexing SWF with Adobe SDK?

Jan 212008
 

I came across this news from the Los Angeles Flex Users Group, then I followed to the new O’Reilly website on RIA: “Inside RIA” to finally end up on John Dowdell’s blog.
As it is the first time I disagree with John, and my answer started to be long, I preferred to import it here directly:

IMHO, Google indexing SWF text would be in fact a great news. I already saw some SWF content indexed by Google SE (mostly it was from static Flash Paper SWF).

The fact that we don’t promote our site only by pushing a keyword is obvious, but denigrating the absolute needs for SWF to be readable from SE is somewhat very strange.

As John said optimizing HTML, links inbounds and Metadata (not sure Metadata are still of any needs from Google) are important but where do you make the difference between HTML and SWF (from a not technical point of view)?
The major problem with SWF is mostly that they are providing dynamic content. The second major problem would be that the text can be converted to vector (so very hard to understand by computer, just see how captcha works…).

Those two problems take apart, why couldn’t we tag our SWF text with HTML tags? Can’t I tell to Google that this part of text is a H1 title or any HTML tag available? Or at least couldn’t I just be knowing how will Search Engines index my content?
A long time ago, I used the text under SWF layer solution to help increase the readability of important content to Search Engines, based on the already known behavior of search engines with HTML.

The sentence that made me jump down my chair was: “it’s hard to see how it would matter much“.
Well, for me just knowing that Google is interested in understanding SWF content is a great news! And I really hope that Matt info was solid :=)

Ahmet

Get your Location on Mobile without a GPS

Dec 052007
 

I just came accross this video on youTube, Google Maps Mobile (GMM) has added a Location services based on CellID (Cell Of Origine).

Cool, now the question is: is there an API from GMM to get this bluedot position and use it with Flash Lite?

Supported device: most web enabled phones such as Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian Based.

More information on gmm website.
Ahmet

Google to let you Vote for Search Result

Nov 292007
 

[Via TechCrunch]

Google is working on a new experience within their search result, offering a way to the users to customize their search (voting for or against a result). Unfortunately this behavior would be only for the users not for all the research neither than for a network of friends / coworkers:

[...]This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.[...]

It sounds quite obvious why Google doesn’t want to open the result to a voting systems (security, spams, relevancy,…). I’m quite persuaded that Google thinks the best way to deliver pertinent search results is to analyze the content of a page and it network of link. Meta tags proved us that we can’t trust people on the web, but meta tags were created by the webmaster (or any things / persons involved in the creation of web pages) and here I’m talking about social results. A platform like Digg proved that a lot of users can give a liability to a voting system, so why won’t Google trust the mass?

Google Experimental Search

Get more information here and here.

Open Social Is Out :)

Nov 022007
 

Just a copy from Opensocial homepage:



The web is better when it’s social

The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

Many sites, one API
open social
Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

In order for developers to get started immediately, Orkut has opened a limited sandbox that you can use to start building apps using the OpenSocial APIs.

Server optional

OpenSocial is built upon Google Gadget technology, so you can build a great, viral social app with little to no serving costs. With the Google Gadget Editor and a simple key/value API, you can build a complete social app with no server at all. Of course, you can also host your application on your own servers if you prefer. In all cases, Google’s gadget caching technology can ease your bandwidth demands should your app suddenly become a worldwide success.

Ahmet

Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web

Oct 262007
 

Peter Patel-Schneider – Explanation of the right way of creating the Semantic Web during a Google TechTalks.
It’s a fairly old (thigs aren’t going so fast in that field anyway) but the main idea are still very interesting: “why building Semantic languages (RDF , RDFs, OML, …) is broken?”.

Ahmet

Google Browser (gBrowser) to Come End November?

Oct 082007
 

I usually try not to forward “prediction”, but this one is interesting:

In April 07, there had been rumors that google invested in a China-based free browser Maxthon. But then later on denied by both Maxthon and Google. Recently, there has been some more rumor about Google’s interest in such project after they register a domain name gbrowser.com. Let’s predict the chance of Google announcing its own web browser by end of Nov 2007!

Gbrowser has effectively been bought by Google.

By now the communities think they will only at 12%. This prediction is for November, but I’m still wondering why they bought gbrowser if not for releasing their own browser (with google gears and desktop RIA capacities)?

Maybe a cross platform mobile browser, what do you predict?

Ahmet

My First Google Check

Sep 152007
 

At the beginning of this week, I’ve received my first check from Google for using Adsense. Since the start of this year I’ve been using it, to see if it could pay my hosting. I nearly have my hosting completly paid by Adsense, what surprised me is the difference between Adsense and Adwords (that I use for my work). For what I’ve noticed, please tell me if I’m wrong, an Adsense user will have 1/10 of what an Adwords users will pay.

Google Check

My experience with Adwords is mostly negative, it asked me a lot of times to define Adwords to optimize the little money we were investing. Here are 5 tips that i find out for a more rational use of Adwords.

  1. Find our your keywords, synonyms and position (can use my seo position tool)
  2. Use the keywords tool from Adwords to have multiple keywords with advertiser competition, choose the lower (it will be cheaper)
  3. Find out website strong on your important keywords and place add on them. Do not just buy keywords, I did and most of the website displaying my adds where spams blog in China.
  4. Depending on how much global your business is, define the Countries and Territories where your adds will appear.
  5. Make several campaign, but never forget that adds are for ROI not for popularity, so do all possible to improve your website landing page.

Ahmet

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