Search Engine War published a post today outlining a test they conducted to see if Googlebot is really following URL's embedded in SWF files. It looks like they are! They are crawling links in SWF files placed on a page with embed tags, and with SWFObject. They are even crawling links in hidden layers.

 Search Engine War also coined the term "flash bombing".  Basically they are saying it may be possible to embed tons of links in a flash file to get them crawled by Google. Sneaky! Search Engine War is planning further testing of Google's ability to crawl and index SWF file content and links.

SEO

I just read this morning that Microsoft has purchased semantic search engine Powerset for $100 million +.  Powerset attempts to uncover the meaning of an entire search phrase and return results bases on its analysis of that phrase. It's different than Google search, which looks at individual words and not the phrase as a whole.

 The Powerset technology has only been available to the public for about a month, and currently only searches wikipedia. An SEO's dream right?  Hopefully Microsoft can take the Powerset technology and improve it's own search engine with it.

 Another interesting note, Powerset is currently monetized with Google Adsense. Wonder how long that will last?

As a final thought, in my opinion, Microsoft would be wise to work on branding their search engine. A lot of people I talk to who are casual internet users (and not people who breath http packets like me) know nothing about live.com. They aren't even aware it exists. Given Microsoft's $50 billion, how about dropping another $100 or $50 million and do some real branding of live.com ? Their SERPs aren't bad, it's more about consumer perception.

SEO microsoft, powerset

If you don't watch SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday you should.  Here is today's video. The first tip is killer LMAO. Love it.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Give It Up from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

SEO

I'm a huge stats junkie so I thought I'd share this with all of you who also find traffic stats interesing. I posted last week about how links from Adobe.com increased the traffic to this blog by about 1000% . The traffic was mostly referred from Adobe.com with about 62% coming from reffering sites and 18% from search engines. Here is what my referral stats looked like for 5/29/08:

 

And here is what they look like this week:

The traffic I have recieved this week from Adobe.com and other referring sites has dropped off significantly, while search engine traffic continues to climb. I guess this shows what a couple of quality links can do for your search engine rankings.

Google, SEO seo

For now I am removing all my Sitemaps from Google. From my experience they only work to keep pages out of Google's index. See, my problem is that almost all the pages on all of my sites are dynamically generated from content provided by a database, API's, feeds, and the like. So, keeping an updated Sitemap on a dynamically generated site with 10's of thousands of pages becomes a burden, especially when the site content is provided via API and you just have no idea how many pages are on your site and what they all are. There is just no good way to keep an updated Google Sitemap for sites like this - even if automated.

 I have tried third party sitemap generators that you run and they crawl your site like a search bot, building the XML the whole way. As many pages as one site can have, it can take many many hours to build the XML to the point that it contains all of the pages. Then, a day later, there are 1000 more pages, so it needs built again. And here is the important part. If you submit a Google Sitemap and you are missing pages from your site in the file, those pages missing from the XML won't get indexed. I don't care what Google or anyone says, this is based on raw experience, and Google will only index pages that are in the Sitemap if you submit one. You can have everthing else wide open as far as no follow, robots.txt etc and they won't get indexed if they aren't in the XML.

Case in point: I recently waxed one of my Sitemaps for a dynamically generated site from my Webmaster Tools account. I hadn't updated the Sitemap in a while and so pages weren't getting indexed. Two days after deleteing the sitemap, all of the pages where indexed. I've seen this over and over again.

 From my personal experience and perspective, the only good thing about using a Sitemap when it comes to Google is using it to clear up problems you see with Googlebot crawling your site. That's it. If you don't have problems with Googlebot crawling your site, you are better off just not using a Sitemap, and let the bot run wild. Use robots.txt to block whatever needs blocked.

Google, SEO

Next Tuesday Nov. 27th is the next Nebraska People Making Money Online Meeting (NPMMO). Brian Mark is the new group organizer so it's no surprise that the next meeting will be an SEO clinic.  Brian is the CTO of Toolbarn.com which ranks #1 on Google for the keyword "tools".. That's #1 out of 1 billion , 80 million results! They also rank in the top spots for "power tools". Holy crap, I'd say he know's how to do SEO. I just read on Brian's blog that at an SES conference, SEO clinics run $1,800 so FREE is a real sweet deal. A free clinic on how to get free traffic!  It looks like Proxibid.com will once again be hosting the event as well. They are always welcoming hosts so it should be an excellent event.

SEO

hartertoback - a member at CodeProject.com, one of my favorite web development communities posted a really good article about how to SEO ASP.NET sites. Many of the tips can be applied to all website, no matter the platform. Others are for ASP.NET sites only.

SEO seo, asp.net