http://www.dancristo.com Search Engine Marketing Blog Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:29:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'm running a small test to determine if .swf files can achieve higher rankings then .html files. Why is this important? Well, historically full flash web sites have been difficult to rank well, but in the past few months, the major search engines have greatly improved their indexing of flash ... http://www.dancristo.com/can-a-flash-swf-outrank-a-html-file/ Today Google opened to the public a Wikipedia like service called Google Knols. Google Knols is an online, collaborative authoriship platform (much like Wikipedia), but with a social side. The idea is to encourage people to write authoriative articles about topics they know about, while the Knols community comments, rates, reviews ... http://www.dancristo.com/google-knols/ Here's a new feature in adwords: Keywords and placements -- together! As of today, both keywords and placements can be targeted in all AdWords campaigns. Use both to get better control and pricing power on the content network.What can you do with keywords plus placements? Bid more or less for specific placements. ... http://www.dancristo.com/google-adwords-keywords-and-placements-together/ A few days ago, Google officially announced they can crawl flash files. Here's is what they said, "Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we've improved the performance of this ... http://www.dancristo.com/google-announces-they-crawl-flash/ I'm making a prediction. I'm predicting that Google has developed their "Friends Connect" service with the intention of using social media to change the search engine results pages (SERPS) as we know it! I'm seeing at least two major changes. 1) Universal Search meets Social Media The idea of universal search (the ... http://www.dancristo.com/social-media-in-serps-thanks-to-universal-search/ Sometimes I feel that Google is doing everything they can to fill their SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) with everything BUT natural search results. I've been watching with concern as Google' s Universal Search Results continues to bury the natural listings under paid listings, news clips, images, YouTube video's, local listings, ... http://www.dancristo.com/local-results-search-forms-in-serps/ I'm sad to say that all the excitement I had built up around Friday's "Friend Connect" post is pretty much gone. I learned today that Facebook is refusing to let Google access their data for the future Friend Connect service. "We're disappointed that Facebook disabled their users' ability to use Friend ... http://www.dancristo.com/facebook-shoots-down-google/ I've removed the No-Follow tags from comment links for the time being. The site is new enough, and small enough, to fly under the radar from spammers. So from now on we'll be giving a little 'search engine love' kick back to the growing community here. http://www.dancristo.com/no-more-no-follow/ I think Google is stretching their logo creativity when trying to honor the, "invention of the first laser". Looks more like a Captcha to me. http://www.dancristo.com/googles-invention-of-the-first-laser/ If you're in the search marketing industry, and you're looking for work, there's one thing that you MUST DO before you start sending out your resume, and that is... Rank for your own name on Google. Every hiring manager who knows what they're doing is going to do a Google search ... http://www.dancristo.com/before-you-send-out-your-sem-resume/