SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SEO COMPANY

Over on the official Google Webmaster Blog, Google are reporting on improvements on their flash indexing technology; this is after numerous requests for it to be improved. They are now able to index all of the text that users can see as they interact with a flash file. In addition to this, they will also be able to discover URLs that appear in the files.

To find out more about this recent update, check it out at the Google Webmaster Blog.

The concept of TrustRank is something that isnt what you would call new, but interesting none the less. The concept is derived from the notion that just like consumers who buy from trusted companies, search engines rank sites based on a number of factors, one of which is how trustworthy the site appears for users.

Factors believed to lead Google into believing a site is trustworthy include access to visible information on security, privacy and the ease of use for users wanting to find information (information architecture).

I found a great image that summarises this courtesy of elliance.com

In this video, posted on Google’s YouTube channel and taken then plugged into a blog post on the Webmaster Central blog, Matt Cutts discusses methods of keeping certain content from being indexed - and removing that content if it is already indexed. Your first reaction may be “why would I want to remove content!? I want as many pages indexed as possible!”, however; this information can be very useful if you find yourself with issues such as your “add to cart” pages being indexed, multiple copies of the same page being indexed (such as if you were to have a printer friendly version of the same content), or even at times when a site’s security is hacked and extra spammy pages added to the site (when something like this is detected it is important to remove the URLs as soon as possible before they have any negative impact on the site rankings and trust level).

Matt presents quite well and the video is well worth a watch;

Google has announced on their Webmaster Central Blog that they have now introduced Video Sitemaps support.

In our effort to help users search all the world’s public videos, the Google Video team joined the Sitemaps folks to introduce Video Sitemaps—an extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make your videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata.

An example is given on the original post.

In this tremendous article by Danny Sullivan over on Search Engine Land he discusses the details of what he refers to as “blended search”, which is a term he uses to describe the new wave of changes to the search results stemming from the inclusion of entries from other mediums such as maps, pictures, videos, blogs, news and so on. Google are the most well known for this with their “Universal Search” of which in Australia the most noticeable result is the Google Maps results that now often occupy the first 3 positions for searches involving a specific location, but the other engines have now started doing the same - or claiming too anyway. (more…)

In an effort by Google to ensure Google Maps are up to date and accurate, they have now changed the service to allow users with a Google account to log in and move the markers on the maps so that they are in the right place. If you see something misplaced, such as a marker for your business address or even your own home you can fix it up by dragging the marker to the correct position on the map.

What you can’t do is go rushing out and purposefully move your competitor markers to Tasmania as the Google folks, being the clever people they are have already thought of that and will log changes and allow users to report abuse. Even though these measures are in place, to save yourself time and headaches, it’s important if you are a business owner to claim and verify your listing so that others cannot make changes to your marker position.

Local search is growing rapidly, and those who use Google for searches daily would have noticed that certain location-specific search terms now show Google Map results in the top 3 positions - so get onto Google maps now and ensure your business is listed and that the pointer is in the correct position to help your customers find you!

In an interesting change of events, Google has introduced a brand new facility in the Webmaster Central area that allows for a site owner to record the geographic location of their website and its intended audiences.

The benefit of this new feature is that Australian’s who utilise cheap web hosting overseas, along with generic .com domain extensions, can now start to be acknowledged as Australian, thus allowing them to rank in Google Australia more effectively. In the past a sites hosting location combined with relevant domain extension such as .com.au would decide the geographic location.

The Google geographic targeting does not allow you to specify multiple top level countries you wish to target, instead only allowing you one. The upside to this however is that you are able to set sub-domains within your site to different geographic locations.

For Example;

http://www.hsbc.com could be targeted to the USA.

http://aus.hsbc.com could be targeted to Australia.

Increase competition for Australian pages?

We can’t be sure as yet. One would assume that with the increased ability for larger companies to target their key demographics off the back of a highly trusted and age old domain, the Australian results will start to be penetrated by larger players using this geographic targeting to their advantage.