I read an interesting article over today at SEOmoz where randfish claims that footer links may be “devalued by search engines automatically” and furthermore that “Yahoo! says they may devalue footer links” and suggests that “Google might do this (or go further) as well.”
This is very alarming and can effect the rankings of many websites who rely on footer links to improve their rankings as well as webmasters who use footer links as a means of navigation (like we do in this site). Footer text links serve an important role in web design and lots of times will give a website that rounded out feel. Also, footer links are very helpful and beneficial for navigation with pda/phone/handheld devices that cannot render a full size page correctly, or pages that are specifically made for these devices. Furthermore, people who are using text based browsers on terminals such as lynx or links also rely on such links for navigation purposes.
The ramifications of such a strategy is sure to shake up the SEO world and we here at Barlam Enterprises will definitely be evaluating our current link structure for our sites as well as our clients such as Alaskan Northern Lights, distributor of light therapy products.
While Yahoo only claims a small share of the search engine market place, only time will tell if and when the big G will implement these ideas. However, when or if they do, you can be assured many more will take notice than currently are.
I like many other webmasters regularly check logs and statistics of my websites to see what type of traffic I am receiving, and where it is coming from. It is a necessary part of search engine optimization and interactive marketing. I personally use awstats (an open source project) for this task as it analyzes the key areas of my logs that I am interested in and outputs it in a very easy to read and use HTML layout. However, awstats while very useful, doesn’t by itself allow you to deeply analyze the logs and see exactly who is visiting you which in turn determines to some extent whether your marketing campaigns have been successful.
Enter GeoLite City by Maxmind. Another open source project (with licensed paid versions as well) that is easily added to awstats as a plugin. GeoLite City is a database of ip address ranges showing the location they are registered to. This allows awstats to check this database against every ip address that visits you, and prints this information into your awstat logs (screenshot)! Pretty cool huh! This information is extremely useful to determine how successful your marketing initiatives have been.
As an example, say you post an ad for investment properties in various local Dallas, Houston and Austin Texas newspapers. In this ad you included your web site information. With this plug-in you will be able to analyze exactly how effective your ads are pulling. Not seeing the results you want and the hits from Houston? Maybe pulling the ad, modifying it or changing the placement will yield better results and a positive return on your investment! That is just a small example of you can utilize this software and the GeoIP database to your advantage. The possibilities are endless!
It was announced yesterday by MarketWatch that “the approval ratings for President George W. Bush have hit a new low, as only 25% of Americans like the way the nation’s 43rd chief executive has performed, according to the most recent survey from Gallup Poll.”
As readers of this site know, we often like to explore current SEO tactics as they apply to current events and after reading this article I was curious. I decided to check out the President’s web site and noticed that its Google PageRank also dropped from a 10/10 to a 9/10. It appears Google has also lost hope for the current administration as well!
What can be made of this new evaluation by the Google gods bots? Has Google moved over to support the Dem’s and condemn the GOP? Unlikely, as Barack Obama and John McCain both now support a PageRank of 8/10 (an increase from 7/10 last reporting period) so no favortism appears present there. Perhaps it is much like the general sentiment of the American public… that we would just like a change or shift in power to a new leader with a different set of policies. A set of policies that can hopefully propel us out of this cesspool that the Bush administration drowned us in the past 8 years.
As many SEO experts know, links play a huge part in search engine optimization results. It is especially inbound links with “dofollow” flags that are of the most importance.
Google has often been hush on the issue but it appears they are finally addressing the relevance of all types of links during a 4 day online blog seminar entitled “link week” written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead.
Maile plans to cover the following during link week:
Day 2: Internal links (links within your site) Day 3: Outbound links (sites you link to)
Day 4: Inbound links (sites linking to you)
On September 9th, 2008, Google crawler bots did what they always do. They crawled sites world wide looking for relevant information to index in its plethora of portals and sites that it operates. But on this date, Google bots picked up one story that it wasn’t supposed to. An archived story that happened to appear on the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s site, that a curious user happened to stumble upon at 1:30AM. A time when the site has very low traffic, which happened to boost this specific article to the Sun’s “Popular Stories” section and then onto the “Most Viewed Articles” section on their front page. That single visit in the early hours of Sunday morning caused all hell to break loose! The article that was moved onto the first page was indeed an article from 2002 in which United Airlines (UAL) filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
There was another problem. The article wasn’t dated, and appeared to Google bots as a valid breaking news story since it was posted to a new url!
At 1:37am, an automated Google bot crawled through the paper’s site for new stories and spotted the link.
Google says its program scanned the piece and, seeing there was no 2002 dateline, indexed the article for inclusion on its news pages.
Three minutes and two seconds later, Google News readers started viewing the story on the Sun Sentinel’s web site.
What ensued next was sheer madness. A Florida investment firm spotted the news story on the site, and submitted it to Bloomberg financial information network. A financial news network monitored constantly by investment managers and stock traders worldwide!
A Bloomberg News staffer found the bankruptcy story on the Sun Sentinel site and, at 11:07a.m., posted a headline about the bankruptcy.
Investors then dumped UAL stock at a huge rate, triggering panic and automatic stop losses. The stock shedded more than 75% of its value and plunged from $12 per share to $3 per share until trading was halted.
Trading resumed later that day after the mess was sorted out and determined that a false bankruptsy news story was to blame. Shares climbed back up to $11 from $3 later in the day, but there are many who are now looking at large losses due to this blunder.
The SEC is investigating, but who is to blame? We are in an instant informational age and sometimes it can cause true anarchy. A somewhat scary thought…
A year ago today the political candidates Search Engine Optimization campaigns were nonexistent. When searching for the keyword “John McCain” his campaign site ranked #68 on the search engines. If you were a company listed on the 7th page of Google you were in serious trouble not to mention the Presidential Candidate for the upcoming election.
Within the last 12 months searching for “John McCain” now in fact pulls up his campaign site as #1. How was this done? A significant amount of back links played a very important role in his high rankings and SEO campaign. When looking on Google his site currently shows 5,390 back links. Wouldn’t that be nice?
With the younger generation of computer savvy users SEO plays an important role in all aspects of Internet Marketing. Glad to see someone told the candidates just how important Search Engine Optimization was!
When Macromedia acquired FutureSplash’s vector based animation software and released as what we know as flash in 1996 to the world a whole new form of web development was unleashed.
This software originally focused on animation to progress the vigorous frame-by-frame animation that was hand drawn. It wasn’t until ActionScript a scripting language that can be easily mistaken for JavaScript was introduced that it was even thought of to develop websites.
With the fine-tuning of the scripting capabilities the software now allowed for animators to quickly script their movements rather than animate their movements one frame at a time.
Newer versions keep making animation even easier, and allowing more activity on web applications, such as flash navigation or the ever popular animated intro to a website. But with the algorithms introduced by the industries leading search engines, what will this bring to flash based websites?
Since flash is an image based animation program, all text, images, and navigation features are converted into images. This means that a search engine will see the flash websites as nothing more than an image. Think of it this way as the search bot is searching through your website which just happens to be flash based (all aspects of the site are included in the flash including text and navigation) it will see nothing. Therefore the bot returns to the search engine that nothing of relevance can be found on your page. This is bad news, especially since search engines drive 80% of traffic to your site.
Since text based navigation seems to be of high importance for these algorithms your site will be excluded from the search engines.
So how do I Incorporate Flash with the search engines in mind?
Moderation is always best when considering to use flash. But this really depends on your companies target market. If you are trying to get the attention of 13-18 year old kids then more animation and movement on your site may be crucial to sales.
As a developer try to stay away from flash navigation. Navigation is a great source for bots to index your site, so use it wisely. If you have to use flash navigation because you need the button to flip 360 degrees when a user rolls over it, then include a text based linking system at the bottom of your site.
Another thing to keep out of your animations would be crucial searchable text that is essential to your product, or company. Keep your text coded in html, you don’t need everything in flash to have an enticing website.
Ask your Web Desigers how they plan on incorporating your Flash animation into your website. If you are planning on running a SEO campaign tell them this ahead of time so they can take that into consideration when developing your website.
Is Flash Dead?
Flash is a great way of grabbing your customer’s attention, and is great for implementing videos, mp3’s or explaining a diagram or business process that couldn’t be illustrated with simple words. Flash wont ever go away, but developers need to use caution of what they want to include in their flash files. Who knows maybe the next generation of Flash developers will make a searchable flash file.
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