Web Design News

There’s a short but important discussion going on over at Webmaster World right now about the need to use this meta tag.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noarchive”>

What people like Edward Lewis and Brett Tabke certainly make sense.

Google has announced that it can use speech recognition technology to transcribe videos from YouTube … and I guess other places … into text which it can then index.

Think about it for a while, could we soon see videos ranking at the top of Google search engine results pages because of what is said in the video?

There is no doubt that video has become an important part of marketing on websites … just look at the quotes on the top of this video production business’ website … but now it might have just become even more important.

If you’re a web designer who is also seriously into search engine optimisation (and not just paying lip service to SEO) then you’ll know of the problems involved in getting Google to crawl a website that uses a lot of Flash.

Only last week I was asked to review a local photographer’s website that is uses a lot of Flash throughout the site. I found that in four years Google has never been able to get beyond the index page because the designer had not provided any work-around for the search engine spiders to to crawl the site and so the search engine rankings for the site were basically non-existant.

But now there’s some good news for Flash based sites. Adobe - the company that produced the Flash technology - has now provided a way for Google to crawl Flash sites. It’s not the complete solution but it is a step in the right direction and it’s still no excuse for failing to provide a text link to a sitemap that Google can follow.

You can read about Google crawling and indexing flash content here and here

Anyone who has read Toni’s and my ramblings in other places will know that neither of us are big fans of Google. Sure, we play their game and abide by their rules but that doesn’t mean we like them or that we would do a whole lot of mourning if they just went away. And if the history of the Internet is anything to go by then perhaps one day they will … but till that day comes we keep up-to-date on what’s happening with Google and the way they crawl web pages.

So it was interesting to see that on Friday Google announced that they have begun to crawl HTML forms. Now there is no guarantee that they’re going to index what they find at the other end because, in their words:

If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.

Google also undertakes not to crawl beyond any forms that require passwords or the entry of personal details and seeks to reassure webmasters by telling them that Googlebot is “ever-friendly” and is always a good Internet citizen … hmmm.

Google also says that Googlebot obeys “nofollow directives”. I must say that our experience of Googlebot in relation to nofollow has been a little different.

Google also claims that they can now crawl Javascript navigation and that may be so but we’re still seeing a lot of pages with Javascript navigation out there on the Web that have not been crawled or indexed despite having been online for a year or more.

I doubt that we’ll be using javascript navigation on any of our sites any time in the foreseeable future.

We don’t often build new sites for clients online; usually they’re built here in the office and only go live once the client has signed off on the final version of the site. But this month we’ve been building one online for a client and it has already delivered the perfect result even before it was finished.

Toni called the client today to make sure they were happy with the final draft and was surprised when the client told her that the site had already started generating leads that had more than paid for the cost of the site design.

It seems that without any attempt to get it spidered the site has already been cached and is appearing at the top of the SERPs in Google for the terms the client wanted to target.

How could that happen? I’ll let you work that one out for yourself :) 

‘unavailable_after’ is a new Meta tag that Google is said to be releasing soon. It seems that it should be included on pages that have limited life and it tells Googlebot not to crawl the page once the offer made on the page has expired.

There are definitely times when I seriously envy those web designers who only have to think about Google.com. I fully realise that getting a good placement on the first page for any query on Google isn’t easy but spare thought for those of us who have to contend with this:

This is Google.com.au and it’s the default page that Google sends all Australian searches to. Sadly for web designers and search engine optimisation specialists the search engine results pages for Google.com.au can be somewhat different to the search engine results pages that you get in Google.com.

But wait, there’s more. See the little radio button marked ‘pages from Australia’? If a searcher clicks that button and then searches for the same term they did when the button was not clicked they will more often than not get a completely different listing to what they did when they first searched Google.com.au.

You might think that differing results should be expected, after all Google is only searching for terms that appear on pages from Australia if that radio button is selected. Sadly though you would be wrong - Google also returns pages from the US even if you select that radio button.

Now spare a thought for those of us who need to produce a website that appears at the top of the listing for all three versions of Google - a site such as one built for a tourist attraction in Australia that wants to attract people from overseas and from Australia as well - one that ranks at the top of page 1 for some important search terms in Google.com and Google.com.au but is nowhere to be seen if that ‘pages from Australia’ button is selected.

How much does Google know about you and the sites you build/design/own … and does it affect the way Google looks at, and ranks, your sites?

Back in November one of Google’s spokesmen revealed that they know far more about webmasters than the vast majority of us ever released. That’s something that Toni and I have been looking at ever since and others have been too.

But what could it mean for web designers and webmasters? Google is not an Algorithm: Google Imparts Intent is definitely worth reading.