Google Is Indexing Flash Links

• Posted by Brent on July 3, 2008 01:55
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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.

Microsoft Buys Powerset

• Posted by Brent on June 27, 2008 00:13
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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.

Some sweet tips here

• Posted by Brent on June 13, 2008 00:51
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If you don't watch SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday you should.  Here is today's video. The first tip is killer LMAO. Love it.

Interesting Stats

• Posted by Brent on June 6, 2008 03:11
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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.