by Grant Gross
Only 30 percent of sensitive information stored on U.S. government laptops and mobile devices, including the personal information of U.S. residents, was encrypted a year ago, despite a series of data breaches at government agencies in recent years, according to an auditor's report.
The report, by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, found that 70 percent of sensitive information held on laptops and mobile devices at 24 major U.S. agencies was unencrypted as of last September. The GAO report defined several types of data as sensitive, including personal medical records, other personal information, law enforcement data and records essential for homeland security.
"While all agencies have initiated efforts to deploy encryption technologies, none had documented comprehensive plans to guide encryption implementation activities," the report said. "As a result federal information may remain at increased risk of unauthorized disclosure, loss, and modification."
The report follows a series of security mishaps by U.S. government agencies in recent years. In March 2007, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service reported that 490 laptops went missing or were stolen in a three-year period. It was likely that many of those laptops contained personal information about U.S. taxpayers, according to an IRS auditor's report.
In September 2006, the U.S. Department of Commerce reported that 1,137 laptops were lost or stolen since 2001, with 249 of them containing some personal data. Other U.S. agencies also reported missing or stolen laptops.
In May 2006, the Department of Veterans Affairs reported that a laptop and hard drive containing personal information of 26.5 million military veterans and their spouses was stolen from the home of an employee at the agency. Law enforcement officers recovered the hardware, and the agency began encrypting its laptops later that year.
The GAO report notes that several laws, including the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) of 2002, require agencies to protect their data. In addition, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) first recommended in 2006, then required in May 2007, that agencies encrypt all sensitive data on mobile computers.
But the OMB mandate and the GAO report largely miss a larger need for information security in the U.S. government, said Phil Dunkelberger, CEO of PGP, a vendor of encryption and other security products, in an interview. The U.S. government needs to focus on a broader approach to cybersecurity, including better protection of data on government networks, he said.
"When are we going to get serious about protecting data -- role-based and policy-based encryption, not just device encryption?" he said. "Until we're serious about taking a strategic view of data ... we're not going to have a big impact."
Even if laptops are encrypted, the government still faces security problems with removable media such as thumb drives, he added. And many U.S. agencies face challenges with finding time to encrypt thousands of laptops and with managing encryption keys once devices are encrypted, he said.
Many government devices may be too old to use recent encryption technology, and government workers may be using nonstandard devices for accessing sensitive information, Dunkelberger added. With all those issues, Dunkelberger said he's not surprised by the GAO report.
The U.S. government has "very well-intentioned mandates to secure data, and yet, the way they've gone about it is kind of a fallacy," Dunkelberger added. "The idea that you can send out a circular from OMB and suddenly, everything magically gets fixed ... is a completely wrong expectation."
Two democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee said they were disappointed with U.S. agency encryption efforts. The committee announced the GAO report late Monday.
"Encryption is not an option, it is a mandate," Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and chairman of the committee, said in a statement. "Unfortunately, I'm not surprised that despite mandates by OMB, the federal government is only 30 percent of the way there. Making the right investments in cybersecurity today will keep us from paying dearly in the long run."
Federal agencies "lag far behind the private sector" in protecting and encrypting data, Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, added in a statement. "I'm concerned that our government is not moving fast enough in its efforts to secure its systems and procedures," she added.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank
by Stephen Shankland
Though a distant third place to Google, Microsoft thinks it can teach its rival a thing or two about searching the Internet.
A big part of Google's rise to search engine leadership was an algorithm called PageRank that assesses a specific page's importance by how many other Web pages link to it and by the importance of those linking pages. Microsoft researchers and academic collaborators, though, detailed an idea this week it calls BrowseRank that seeks to bring more of a human touch to that assessment.
Microsoft likes the results BrowseRank, which assigning Web page priority based on how people actually use the site.
Essentially, the researchers tested out a system that replaces PageRanks' link graph--a mathematical model of the hyperlinked connections of the Internet--with what they call a user browsing graph that ranks Web pages by people's behavior.
"The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important.
We can leverage hundreds of millions of users' implicit voting on page importance," the researchers said in BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance, a paper from the SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference this week in Singapore. Authors are Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, and Hang Li from Microsoft Research Asia and Ying Zhang of Nankai University, Zhiming Ma of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shuyuan He of Peking University.
Search is of tremendous importance to the Internet for many reasons. For one thing, search engines are highly influential middlemen that steer users to Web sites they may not be able to find on their own. For another, queries typed into search engines can be powerful--and in Google's case highly profitable--indications of what type of advertisement to place next to the search results.
But Microsoft lags leader Google and No. 2 Yahoo in search. It's trying hard to catch up, for example with unsuccessful proposals to acquire Yahoo or its search business that would cost the company billions of dollars. And Microsoft just bought search start-up Powerset.
Google isn't putting all its eggs in the PageRank basket, though.
"It's important to keep in mind that PageRank is just one of more than 200 signals we use to determine the ranking of a Web site," the company said in a statement. "Search remains at the core of everything Google does, and we are always working to improve it."
PageRank shortcomingsThe Microsoft researchers argue that PageRank has a number of problems. For one thing, people can game the system by building bogus Web sites called link farms. Those sites feature hyperlinks point to a Web page whose importance a person wants to inflate so it appears higher in search results. Another PageRank issue is that the indexing process doesn't take into account the time a user spends on a particular site.
But user behavior, monitored in anonymous form by Web servers and Web browser plug-ins, can be better, the authors argue.
"Experimental results show that BrowseRank can achieve better performance than existing methods, including PageRank...in important page finding, spam page fighting, and relevance ranking.
The researchers gathered their data from "an extremely large group of users under legal agreements with them," according to the paper.
There's no denying PageRank is useful, though, and such algorithms could be added into a larger formula for determining which sites come out on top of search results.
"It is also possible to combine link graph and user behavior data to compute page importance," the researchers said. "We will not discuss more about this possibility in this paper, and simply leave it as future work."
Bringing research to fruitionIt can be a long time before research comes to fruition, but funding a group of researchers can be much less expensive than acquiring other companies. No doubt Microsoft, especially after years of effort and its thwarted overtures to Yahoo, would like to see its in-house search efforts bring Google to its knees.
When accused of being dominant, Google representatives often argue the company could lose its search dominance if somebody else builds a better mousetrap and Internet users divert their path to that other door door. "If Microsoft or Yahoo are successful in providing similar or better web search results or more relevant advertisements, or in leveraging their platforms or products to make their Web search or advertising services easier to access, we could experience a significant decline in user traffic or the size of the Google (ad) Network," it said in its most recent quarterly report.
The top players are a moving target, though. Yahoo is hoping to improve search with three efforts: BOSS (build your own search service), which lets others employ Yahoo search results along with its search ads; SearchMonkey, which lets content publishers build elaborate mini-Web pages into search results; and Glue Pages, which present a smorgasbord of related content alongside search results.
And Google invests heavily, too. Its biggest research team is devoted to search, and the company updated its search formula more than 100 times in the second quarter. And researchers have huge infrastructure at their disposal to try new ideas.
"My group at Google has at its disposal many thousands of machines, with storage measured in petabytes," Udi Manber, head of Google's search quality, said of Google's search research infrastructure in a June talk. And, he added, engineers are empowered to try their results, with meetings once or twice a week to see how well they worked: "There is no separation of research and development. Everyone does both."
Though a distant third place to Google, Microsoft thinks it can teach its rival a thing or two about searching the Internet.
A big part of Google's rise to search engine leadership was an algorithm called PageRank that assesses a specific page's importance by how many other Web pages link to it and by the importance of those linking pages. Microsoft researchers and academic collaborators, though, detailed an idea this week it calls BrowseRank that seeks to bring more of a human touch to that assessment.
Microsoft likes the results BrowseRank, which assigning Web page priority based on how people actually use the site.
Essentially, the researchers tested out a system that replaces PageRanks' link graph--a mathematical model of the hyperlinked connections of the Internet--with what they call a user browsing graph that ranks Web pages by people's behavior.
"The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important.
We can leverage hundreds of millions of users' implicit voting on page importance," the researchers said in BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance, a paper from the SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference this week in Singapore. Authors are Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, and Hang Li from Microsoft Research Asia and Ying Zhang of Nankai University, Zhiming Ma of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shuyuan He of Peking University.
Search is of tremendous importance to the Internet for many reasons. For one thing, search engines are highly influential middlemen that steer users to Web sites they may not be able to find on their own. For another, queries typed into search engines can be powerful--and in Google's case highly profitable--indications of what type of advertisement to place next to the search results.
But Microsoft lags leader Google and No. 2 Yahoo in search. It's trying hard to catch up, for example with unsuccessful proposals to acquire Yahoo or its search business that would cost the company billions of dollars. And Microsoft just bought search start-up Powerset.
Google isn't putting all its eggs in the PageRank basket, though.
"It's important to keep in mind that PageRank is just one of more than 200 signals we use to determine the ranking of a Web site," the company said in a statement. "Search remains at the core of everything Google does, and we are always working to improve it."
PageRank shortcomingsThe Microsoft researchers argue that PageRank has a number of problems. For one thing, people can game the system by building bogus Web sites called link farms. Those sites feature hyperlinks point to a Web page whose importance a person wants to inflate so it appears higher in search results. Another PageRank issue is that the indexing process doesn't take into account the time a user spends on a particular site.
But user behavior, monitored in anonymous form by Web servers and Web browser plug-ins, can be better, the authors argue.
"Experimental results show that BrowseRank can achieve better performance than existing methods, including PageRank...in important page finding, spam page fighting, and relevance ranking.
The researchers gathered their data from "an extremely large group of users under legal agreements with them," according to the paper.
There's no denying PageRank is useful, though, and such algorithms could be added into a larger formula for determining which sites come out on top of search results.
"It is also possible to combine link graph and user behavior data to compute page importance," the researchers said. "We will not discuss more about this possibility in this paper, and simply leave it as future work."
Bringing research to fruitionIt can be a long time before research comes to fruition, but funding a group of researchers can be much less expensive than acquiring other companies. No doubt Microsoft, especially after years of effort and its thwarted overtures to Yahoo, would like to see its in-house search efforts bring Google to its knees.
When accused of being dominant, Google representatives often argue the company could lose its search dominance if somebody else builds a better mousetrap and Internet users divert their path to that other door door. "If Microsoft or Yahoo are successful in providing similar or better web search results or more relevant advertisements, or in leveraging their platforms or products to make their Web search or advertising services easier to access, we could experience a significant decline in user traffic or the size of the Google (ad) Network," it said in its most recent quarterly report.
The top players are a moving target, though. Yahoo is hoping to improve search with three efforts: BOSS (build your own search service), which lets others employ Yahoo search results along with its search ads; SearchMonkey, which lets content publishers build elaborate mini-Web pages into search results; and Glue Pages, which present a smorgasbord of related content alongside search results.
And Google invests heavily, too. Its biggest research team is devoted to search, and the company updated its search formula more than 100 times in the second quarter. And researchers have huge infrastructure at their disposal to try new ideas.
"My group at Google has at its disposal many thousands of machines, with storage measured in petabytes," Udi Manber, head of Google's search quality, said of Google's search research infrastructure in a June talk. And, he added, engineers are empowered to try their results, with meetings once or twice a week to see how well they worked: "There is no separation of research and development. Everyone does both."
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Building a better website
By Steve Strauss
Q: I recently lost my job and am thinking about starting a business. I have a good idea for a website but I am concerned about all of the competition. Do you think it is possible to make my online business different and better, and if so, how?
Note that I am not talking about the business side here. What you sell is entirely up to you. Instead, I want to look at the online side of online businesses, and what makes that work.
I suggest that there are two key components to creating a successful online small business. The first is, you have to have a great site. The second is, you have to market your site so that people can find it.
Now, maybe the preceding paragraph seems self-evident to you, maybe you are thinking, "Thanks for the great insight there, Steve!" But I don't think so.
So the first secret online is to have a professional, elegant, site. Do that, and the rest is much easier, but fail to do it, and your chances of e-success are diminished greatly.
This brings me to the second factor — e-marketing. I spoke about this subject — online small business success — last week with Jeff Zimmerman, the Vice President of Product Management for Online Marketing and E-Commerce for Network Solutions.
Network Solutions (a company I do some work with), is an excellent friend to small business. It is one of those great Net companies that has been around seemingly forever. For instance, when I got my web address back in the late 90s, MrAllBiz.com, it was Network Solutions who helped me. Since then, their services have grown to include everything from web hosting and site design to e-commerce and online security.
Jeff first pointed out that succeeding online is much easier than some people think, and much more affordable, for three main reasons:
1. Marketing online is unique: Offline, marketing often is a shotgun affair for many small businesses. They spend a lot to target a lot of people (in the newspaper, on the radio, etc.) with the intent of hopefully hitting a few. But online, especially with tools like pay-per-click, it is much easier to spend your marketing dollars more specifically and intelligently by buying only those keywords and geographic regions that have the highest likelihood of success.
2. Tracking results is easier: Because of No. 1 above, it is easier with online advertising and marketing to track your results. Offline, it is hard to say how someone finds you and makes a call (signs, ads, networking, or what?) but online, you can see immediately which keywords pull best, which ads work best, which pages convert the most, etc.
3. Cycles are shorter: Quicker tracking means you can adjust your online ad campaigns much more quickly. If a TV buy does not work, it may take months to find out and adjust. Not so online.
Of course, there are no shortage of sites intended to help you succeed in your online business, but I must say that Jeff pointed a new one out to me that I found to be very powerful.
MySolutionsSpot offers the e-preneur a wide variety of success tools. The articles and forums are nice for sure, but it was the analytical e-tools that I found to be remarkable:
• The keyword suggestion tool helps take the guesswork out of choosing the right keywords for your SEO and your e-marketing
• The search engine spider simulator lets you see what a search engine spider sees. Are your keywords working? Do you have enough homepage content?
• The link popularity check helps you see how many people are linking to your site, a key component to SEO.
It is getting ever easier to start and succeed online because tools like these are making it possible to create a site that can get noticed. If you build it, they won't necessarily come. But if you build it right, and market it right, you can bet they will.
Today's tip: Jeff Zimmerman also point me to an interesting study which found that the average cost per acquisition for search engine advertising was $8.50 per customer, as opposed to $20 each for Yellow Page advertising, $60 for email and $70 for Direct Mail.
Q: I recently lost my job and am thinking about starting a business. I have a good idea for a website but I am concerned about all of the competition. Do you think it is possible to make my online business different and better, and if so, how?
Note that I am not talking about the business side here. What you sell is entirely up to you. Instead, I want to look at the online side of online businesses, and what makes that work.
I suggest that there are two key components to creating a successful online small business. The first is, you have to have a great site. The second is, you have to market your site so that people can find it.
Now, maybe the preceding paragraph seems self-evident to you, maybe you are thinking, "Thanks for the great insight there, Steve!" But I don't think so.
So the first secret online is to have a professional, elegant, site. Do that, and the rest is much easier, but fail to do it, and your chances of e-success are diminished greatly.
This brings me to the second factor — e-marketing. I spoke about this subject — online small business success — last week with Jeff Zimmerman, the Vice President of Product Management for Online Marketing and E-Commerce for Network Solutions.
Network Solutions (a company I do some work with), is an excellent friend to small business. It is one of those great Net companies that has been around seemingly forever. For instance, when I got my web address back in the late 90s, MrAllBiz.com, it was Network Solutions who helped me. Since then, their services have grown to include everything from web hosting and site design to e-commerce and online security.
Jeff first pointed out that succeeding online is much easier than some people think, and much more affordable, for three main reasons:
1. Marketing online is unique: Offline, marketing often is a shotgun affair for many small businesses. They spend a lot to target a lot of people (in the newspaper, on the radio, etc.) with the intent of hopefully hitting a few. But online, especially with tools like pay-per-click, it is much easier to spend your marketing dollars more specifically and intelligently by buying only those keywords and geographic regions that have the highest likelihood of success.
2. Tracking results is easier: Because of No. 1 above, it is easier with online advertising and marketing to track your results. Offline, it is hard to say how someone finds you and makes a call (signs, ads, networking, or what?) but online, you can see immediately which keywords pull best, which ads work best, which pages convert the most, etc.
3. Cycles are shorter: Quicker tracking means you can adjust your online ad campaigns much more quickly. If a TV buy does not work, it may take months to find out and adjust. Not so online.
Of course, there are no shortage of sites intended to help you succeed in your online business, but I must say that Jeff pointed a new one out to me that I found to be very powerful.
MySolutionsSpot offers the e-preneur a wide variety of success tools. The articles and forums are nice for sure, but it was the analytical e-tools that I found to be remarkable:
• The keyword suggestion tool helps take the guesswork out of choosing the right keywords for your SEO and your e-marketing
• The search engine spider simulator lets you see what a search engine spider sees. Are your keywords working? Do you have enough homepage content?
• The link popularity check helps you see how many people are linking to your site, a key component to SEO.
It is getting ever easier to start and succeed online because tools like these are making it possible to create a site that can get noticed. If you build it, they won't necessarily come. But if you build it right, and market it right, you can bet they will.
Today's tip: Jeff Zimmerman also point me to an interesting study which found that the average cost per acquisition for search engine advertising was $8.50 per customer, as opposed to $20 each for Yellow Page advertising, $60 for email and $70 for Direct Mail.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Social Bookmarking 101
A Simple Guide To Being Productive On The Internet
Social bookmarking is a surefire way to improve your productivity on the Internet. Most online businesses are finding out how social bookmarking can improve their venture, giving their Internet marketing strategies a much needed boost to increase their online presence and accessibility.
What Is Bookmarking And Social Bookmarking?
Bookmarking is a term used when an individual tags a Web site on their own respective Web browser. If you think that a page is interesting enough to merit another visit, you can just bookmark it on your application to be opened later on without needing to look for it again.
Social bookmarking has the same concept above except that it is on much grander scale than storing your tagged sites on your own computer. Social bookmarking involves tagging sites into your Web site that can be accessed by those within your network -- or if your feature permits, to the rest of the people in your social bookmarking community. But in what way can this benefit your Web site for it to be productive on the Internet?
Boosting SEO Results
We all know for a fact that search engine optimization (SEO) can boost your Web site's traffic by making it appear on the top ranks of search engine results. In fact, you might be hiring an SEO professional or you can do it on your own to implement on-site SEO strategies to increase your ranking.
But other than doing it on-site (which simply means that you are modifying your own Web site for SEO), you can practically go off-site to increase its probability to be in the top ranks -- this is where social bookmarking comes in.
One way to increase your rank in search engine results through other than keywords is through your page rank. Your page rank will increase with the number of links that is propagated on the Internet that points back to your site. In social bookmarking, you are practically tagging sites that are accessible to the rest of your network. The more people that bookmark your site into their own, then you can easily say that your page rank will increase as well.
You can implement a social bookmarking strategy that involves telling other within your network to bookmark your site in theirs, if you bookmark their site in yours. This is like a link building concept used in basic SEO. The more people that tag your site, the more successful your online venture would be -- in terms of reputation and profit.
Vanessa Arellano Doctor
wirefan.com
Social bookmarking is a surefire way to improve your productivity on the Internet. Most online businesses are finding out how social bookmarking can improve their venture, giving their Internet marketing strategies a much needed boost to increase their online presence and accessibility.
What Is Bookmarking And Social Bookmarking?
Bookmarking is a term used when an individual tags a Web site on their own respective Web browser. If you think that a page is interesting enough to merit another visit, you can just bookmark it on your application to be opened later on without needing to look for it again.
Social bookmarking has the same concept above except that it is on much grander scale than storing your tagged sites on your own computer. Social bookmarking involves tagging sites into your Web site that can be accessed by those within your network -- or if your feature permits, to the rest of the people in your social bookmarking community. But in what way can this benefit your Web site for it to be productive on the Internet?
Boosting SEO Results
We all know for a fact that search engine optimization (SEO) can boost your Web site's traffic by making it appear on the top ranks of search engine results. In fact, you might be hiring an SEO professional or you can do it on your own to implement on-site SEO strategies to increase your ranking.
But other than doing it on-site (which simply means that you are modifying your own Web site for SEO), you can practically go off-site to increase its probability to be in the top ranks -- this is where social bookmarking comes in.
One way to increase your rank in search engine results through other than keywords is through your page rank. Your page rank will increase with the number of links that is propagated on the Internet that points back to your site. In social bookmarking, you are practically tagging sites that are accessible to the rest of your network. The more people that bookmark your site into their own, then you can easily say that your page rank will increase as well.
You can implement a social bookmarking strategy that involves telling other within your network to bookmark your site in theirs, if you bookmark their site in yours. This is like a link building concept used in basic SEO. The more people that tag your site, the more successful your online venture would be -- in terms of reputation and profit.
Vanessa Arellano Doctor
wirefan.com
Friday, July 18, 2008
Get on Google's Good Side With SEO
Get on Google's Good Side With SEO
by Steven Strauss
One of the questions I hear most often these days goes something like, "How the heck am I supposed to keep my small business going in this economy? I don't have a lot of money for advertising." A valid lament for sure.
Unlike big businesses that are doing well (think Exxon Mobil XOM) or even big companies that are not (airlines, Starbucks SBUX, etc.) one of the first things to be cut when tough times hit small businesses is the advertising and marketing budget.
The good news is that there is in fact a great way to market your business that is not expensive and is very effective. However, it is quite time-consuming.
It's called search engine optimization. SEO gets you noticed, is practically free marketing and increases sales. SEO is the magic bullet.
Oh, I can hear your collective cries now: "Come on Steve, it's too hard; it doesn't work; it's for businesses far bigger than mine; I don't know how to do it, I don't have time to learn it."
I say, remember the immortal words of Paul Harvey: "In times like these it is good to know there have always been times like these." The point is, good times and bad times are part of this gig; you signed up for them when you decided to go into business for yourself.
And if that is true, then it is also true that in times like these, hearty entrepreneurs learn new skills. That is both the joy and sorrow of self employment.
Teach Yourself a New Trick Sure SEO is a challenge; no doubt about it. But it is also true that many people have figured it out. Whenever you Google GOOG some word or phrase, you can almost bet that the folks whose Web sites appear on the first page have put considerable effort into learning about, utilizing and honing SEO.And if they did it, so can you.
I am reminded of the 1997 movie The Edge with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin. In it, the two men are stranded in the Alaska Outback after their small plane crashes.
Soon they are being stalked by a bear. Eventually Hopkins' character convinces himself and Baldwin's character, Bob, that they can slay the bear.
"I'm going to kill the bear," Hopkins' character says, "Say it! Say I'm going to kill the bear!"
Bob says it, halfheartedly.
Charles (Hopkins) then yells at Bob: "Say it! Say I'm going to kill the bear!" Bob says it.
"Say it again," says Charles. Bob, starting to feel it, says it more loudly. "I'm going to kill the bear." "Again!" Charles bellows. Finally, Bob yells, convincingly, " I Am Going To Kill The Bear!"
Finally, they kill the bear.
Not knowing SEO may be your virtual "bear." Take a class about it. Read a book about it. Practice until you become convincingly proficient.
Slay your bear.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Microsoft-Google-Yahoo Squabble Plays Out in Senate
by Chloe Albanesius
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo clashed Tuesday during a contentious Senate hearing that saw Yahoo and Google vigorously defend their ad partnership as healthy competition, while Yahoo slammed Microsoft's continued efforts to acquire Yahoo.
"This is a commercial arrangement between two companies who will remain autonomous and compete aggressively – in search and display advertising, mobile, news, e-mail, finance – you name it," Michael Callahan, Yahoo's general counsel, told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. "Yahoo is here to stay and we intend to compete across countless platforms, including search, for years to come."
"Supplier arrangements are commonplace in many industries," said David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer at Google. "Canon supplies laser printer engines to Hewlett Packard, while also competing in the sale of laser printers."
Last month, Google announced a non-exclusive agreement with Yahoo that will allow the Internet company access to Google's AdSense for search and content advertising programs in the U.S. and Canada. Google stressed that the deal was not a merger, just a business partnership, but the deal has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers who want to make sure the arrangement does not run afoul of antitrust laws.
Among the detractors is Microsoft, which has been trying for months to acquire Yahoo. Yahoo last weekend rejected a proposed ad deal from Microsoft, and now billionaire investor and Yahoo shareholder Carl Icahn has launched a proxy fight for Yahoo in an effort to secure a takeover deal for Microsoft.
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo "are laser focused on being significant players in search," Callahan said. "With this business arrangement, Yahoo will continue to execute on its long term corporate strategy. Microsoft, on the other hand, has turned to activist shareholder Carl Icahn, in the apparent hope that this will force a fire sale of Yahoo's core strategic search business."
Yahoo will not "allow our business to be dismantled or sold off piecemeal on terms that would be disadvantageous to Yahoo stockholders and to the market as a whole," Callahan pledged.
Brad Smith, Microsoft's vice president and general counsel, painted the software giant as a company just trying to keep up in a Yahoo-Google world.
A Google-Yahoo match up will create an unprecedented level of concentration in search advertising, produce fewer choices for advertisers, result in higher prices, and create privacy concerns, he said.
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo clashed Tuesday during a contentious Senate hearing that saw Yahoo and Google vigorously defend their ad partnership as healthy competition, while Yahoo slammed Microsoft's continued efforts to acquire Yahoo.
"This is a commercial arrangement between two companies who will remain autonomous and compete aggressively – in search and display advertising, mobile, news, e-mail, finance – you name it," Michael Callahan, Yahoo's general counsel, told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. "Yahoo is here to stay and we intend to compete across countless platforms, including search, for years to come."
"Supplier arrangements are commonplace in many industries," said David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer at Google. "Canon supplies laser printer engines to Hewlett Packard, while also competing in the sale of laser printers."
Last month, Google announced a non-exclusive agreement with Yahoo that will allow the Internet company access to Google's AdSense for search and content advertising programs in the U.S. and Canada. Google stressed that the deal was not a merger, just a business partnership, but the deal has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers who want to make sure the arrangement does not run afoul of antitrust laws.
Among the detractors is Microsoft, which has been trying for months to acquire Yahoo. Yahoo last weekend rejected a proposed ad deal from Microsoft, and now billionaire investor and Yahoo shareholder Carl Icahn has launched a proxy fight for Yahoo in an effort to secure a takeover deal for Microsoft.
Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo "are laser focused on being significant players in search," Callahan said. "With this business arrangement, Yahoo will continue to execute on its long term corporate strategy. Microsoft, on the other hand, has turned to activist shareholder Carl Icahn, in the apparent hope that this will force a fire sale of Yahoo's core strategic search business."
Yahoo will not "allow our business to be dismantled or sold off piecemeal on terms that would be disadvantageous to Yahoo stockholders and to the market as a whole," Callahan pledged.
Brad Smith, Microsoft's vice president and general counsel, painted the software giant as a company just trying to keep up in a Yahoo-Google world.
A Google-Yahoo match up will create an unprecedented level of concentration in search advertising, produce fewer choices for advertisers, result in higher prices, and create privacy concerns, he said.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
No Manual Intervention On Rankings, Says Google
By David A. Utter
They don't, except for when they do
The search advertising company doesn't go in and tweak the results that come up for queries, except for the times that it does.
Plenty of sound reasons exist for manually editing search results. Listings leading to sites containing viruses or malware, pages detailing illegal content like child exploitation, or simply content that someone, somewhere, wants removed on some kind of legal grounds, all face the prospect of being excised from Google's index.
"In our view, the web is built by people," Amit Singhal said at the official Google blog, in his introduction to Google ranking. "You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms."
Don't get excited, webmasters, Singhal isn't shedding any sunlight on the black box of Google's rankings. He shared more of a philosophical viewpoint, an interesting one given he's worked on Google's secret algorithm sauce since 2000.
Ahead of the "no manual intervention" position Google prefers to maintain for its rankings, Singhal said the company wants to serve the most relevant results it can to a given user, and to keep that deliver simple. "We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change. Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query," he said.
A couple of reasons occur to Singhal in response to that "common - but misguided" question about manual intervention. First was the 'people making links and pages' concept mentioned previously. The second reason, well, sometimes a broken query means an opportunity to improve the algorithm again.
And again, and again, and again.
For our webmaster readers who value their rankings, it means there will always be some kind of changes taking place under the hood of Google's ride. To echo Professor Moody from the Harry Potter books, 'constant vigilance' should be the webmaster's credo. Blogoscoped.com discussed Google and manual edits two years ago, but the advice bears repeating today.
The search advertising company doesn't go in and tweak the results that come up for queries, except for the times that it does.
Plenty of sound reasons exist for manually editing search results. Listings leading to sites containing viruses or malware, pages detailing illegal content like child exploitation, or simply content that someone, somewhere, wants removed on some kind of legal grounds, all face the prospect of being excised from Google's index.
"In our view, the web is built by people," Amit Singhal said at the official Google blog, in his introduction to Google ranking. "You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms."
Don't get excited, webmasters, Singhal isn't shedding any sunlight on the black box of Google's rankings. He shared more of a philosophical viewpoint, an interesting one given he's worked on Google's secret algorithm sauce since 2000.
Ahead of the "no manual intervention" position Google prefers to maintain for its rankings, Singhal said the company wants to serve the most relevant results it can to a given user, and to keep that deliver simple. "We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change. Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query," he said.
A couple of reasons occur to Singhal in response to that "common - but misguided" question about manual intervention. First was the 'people making links and pages' concept mentioned previously. The second reason, well, sometimes a broken query means an opportunity to improve the algorithm again.
And again, and again, and again.
For our webmaster readers who value their rankings, it means there will always be some kind of changes taking place under the hood of Google's ride. To echo Professor Moody from the Harry Potter books, 'constant vigilance' should be the webmaster's credo. Blogoscoped.com discussed Google and manual edits two years ago, but the advice bears repeating today.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Toyota's solar-powered Prius
by Rory Reid
We applaud any carmaker that harnesses the power of technology, particularly if it helps fuel economy, makes driving fun, or makes us look cool. That's why we launched the U.K. version of Car Tech.
So our ears perked up when we heard Toyota is upgrading its Prius. Not only will it feature a hybrid electric-gasoline engine and automatic self-parking (see its robot skills in action here), but it will soon get solar panels on the roof to power its air-conditioning system.
That last bit might not sound too exciting, but it has potential. Automotive air-conditioning systems are usually powered by your car's engine, which has to work harder to keep the car moving and its occupants cool. By using a combination of a solar panel and an electric motor, Toyota is able to use the power of the sun against itself, save gas, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
It's a shame that these particular solar panels can't be used to power the entire vehicle, but there is hope: A U.S. company called SEV has already demonstrated a modified, solar-powered Prius that improves fuel economy by about 29 percent. According to SEV, this gives you a daily electric-only range of 20 miles.
We'll have to wait until 2009 to see whether Toyota's implementation makes a real difference.
We applaud any carmaker that harnesses the power of technology, particularly if it helps fuel economy, makes driving fun, or makes us look cool. That's why we launched the U.K. version of Car Tech.
So our ears perked up when we heard Toyota is upgrading its Prius. Not only will it feature a hybrid electric-gasoline engine and automatic self-parking (see its robot skills in action here), but it will soon get solar panels on the roof to power its air-conditioning system.
That last bit might not sound too exciting, but it has potential. Automotive air-conditioning systems are usually powered by your car's engine, which has to work harder to keep the car moving and its occupants cool. By using a combination of a solar panel and an electric motor, Toyota is able to use the power of the sun against itself, save gas, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
It's a shame that these particular solar panels can't be used to power the entire vehicle, but there is hope: A U.S. company called SEV has already demonstrated a modified, solar-powered Prius that improves fuel economy by about 29 percent. According to SEV, this gives you a daily electric-only range of 20 miles.
We'll have to wait until 2009 to see whether Toyota's implementation makes a real difference.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Fear The Google Blacklist
By Thomas Claburn
What happens when search engine optimization backfires? Hitwise researchers illustrate one cautionary tale.
Internet metrics company Hitwise on Wednesday published a cautionary tale about the dangers of excessive search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization (SEO) aims to make a Web site appear higher up on search results pages for keywords related to the Web site's business.
More Internet InsightsWhite PapersEffective Web Policies: Ensuring Staff Productivity and Legal Compliance Effectively Managing Online Transactions with CA’s APM Solution GoCompare.com, a U.K.-based car insurance comparison site, apparently used SEO techniques to reach the number one position for the term "car insurance" on Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s U.K. site.
Then, according to Hitwise U.K. research director Robin Goad, the site got blacklisted by Google, presumably because the SEO techniques it used violated Google's rules.
Google has a lengthy list of rules for Web site owners about what is and isn't acceptable. And Google makes the consequences clear: "If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or 'throwaway' domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index," Google explains. "Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to 'help' you."
The penalty for breaking these rules (and getting caught) can be devastating for online businesses.
"[S]ince being 'blacklisted' it has dropped down the listings and, at the time of writing, is currently on the seventh page of listings -- i.e. well outside of the top 10," said Robin Goad, research director of Hitwise U.K., in a blog post.
A spokesperson from GoCompare.com wasn't immediately available to confirm what had happened. But the company's listing is indeed on the seventh search results page for Google.co.uk.
To hammer the point home, Goad's post includes a graph that shows GoCompare.com's search traffic dropping 87% between the 26th of January, when it held the number one spot for "car insurance," and the 9th of February. During the same period, the company's competitors saw their share of traffic generated from "car insurance" searches rise.
Goad says the GoCompare.com's experience "illustrates the fine balance that needs to be achieved between effective SEO and breaking the 'rules.'" It also demonstrates why Google is feared.
What happens when search engine optimization backfires? Hitwise researchers illustrate one cautionary tale.
Internet metrics company Hitwise on Wednesday published a cautionary tale about the dangers of excessive search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization (SEO) aims to make a Web site appear higher up on search results pages for keywords related to the Web site's business.
More Internet InsightsWhite PapersEffective Web Policies: Ensuring Staff Productivity and Legal Compliance Effectively Managing Online Transactions with CA’s APM Solution GoCompare.com, a U.K.-based car insurance comparison site, apparently used SEO techniques to reach the number one position for the term "car insurance" on Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s U.K. site.
Then, according to Hitwise U.K. research director Robin Goad, the site got blacklisted by Google, presumably because the SEO techniques it used violated Google's rules.
Google has a lengthy list of rules for Web site owners about what is and isn't acceptable. And Google makes the consequences clear: "If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or 'throwaway' domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index," Google explains. "Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to 'help' you."
The penalty for breaking these rules (and getting caught) can be devastating for online businesses.
"[S]ince being 'blacklisted' it has dropped down the listings and, at the time of writing, is currently on the seventh page of listings -- i.e. well outside of the top 10," said Robin Goad, research director of Hitwise U.K., in a blog post.
A spokesperson from GoCompare.com wasn't immediately available to confirm what had happened. But the company's listing is indeed on the seventh search results page for Google.co.uk.
To hammer the point home, Goad's post includes a graph that shows GoCompare.com's search traffic dropping 87% between the 26th of January, when it held the number one spot for "car insurance," and the 9th of February. During the same period, the company's competitors saw their share of traffic generated from "car insurance" searches rise.
Goad says the GoCompare.com's experience "illustrates the fine balance that needs to be achieved between effective SEO and breaking the 'rules.'" It also demonstrates why Google is feared.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Why are SEO experts in high demand?
CIOL Bureau
To generate leads, enquiries or sales via your website, you need a professional that knows just how to get great results
With the rise in awareness in the public domain of the term SEO (search engine optimisation), SEO experts are now in great demand by ambitious website owners that want to increase targeted traffic to their websites. In order to generate leads, enquiries or sales via your website you need a professional that knows just how to get great results with a substantial ROI (return on investment).
SEO or search engine optimisation is the process of optimising a website in order to achieve top rankings on major search engines that attract vast numbers of searches every single day, which could be providing your website with lucrative sales.
While it isn't rocket science, search engine optimisation requires some hard work, smart strategy and patience, in order to achieve the substantial growth in targeted traffic that is possible for your business.
As more and more website owners become aware of SEO, it is vital that you have an online strategy to market your website effectively using an SEO expert with experience in successful campaigns.
Some of the more common methods of SEO are listed below, and if you follow these, you could be well on your way to increasing your targeted traffic.
Keyword analysis
Often overlooked, this is the most critical stage of any SEO or internet marketing campaign or strategy. Knowing what your users are searching for around the world is vital to increasing targeted leads and turnover. If you are focusing on keywords that you think are important, instead of using professional tools to find out what users are physically typing into the major search engines, then you are wasting your time and money.
Analysing your keywords is of paramount importance and you should engage people around you for their ideas on keywords, until you build up a complete picture of possible keywords and thin filter out the ones that are not being searched for.
Meta tag optimisation
By properly optimising the meta tags of your website, you are effectively informing the search engines what the subject and content of your site is. This also helps traffic to your site from search engine requests in the major search engines. Optimised properly, you can attract more visitors using this basic, but often overlooked essential area of SEO.
Content
Good content is precisely what the majority of visitors and search engines want to see. If your website is to appeal to users, then your site should have fresh, relevant, targeted content that is there to provide a benefit to the visitor.
Whether you employ a copywriter, a consultant or an expert in search engine optimisation, you must have well-written, compelling and above all unique content, to stand a chance in the ever competitive internet.
This is just three examples of how an SEO expert would increase your traffic, leads and turnover. To get a full insight into how to obtain top 10 rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, speak to your local expert and find out what business you could be generating from this highly rewarding area of Internet marketing.
To generate leads, enquiries or sales via your website, you need a professional that knows just how to get great results
With the rise in awareness in the public domain of the term SEO (search engine optimisation), SEO experts are now in great demand by ambitious website owners that want to increase targeted traffic to their websites. In order to generate leads, enquiries or sales via your website you need a professional that knows just how to get great results with a substantial ROI (return on investment).
SEO or search engine optimisation is the process of optimising a website in order to achieve top rankings on major search engines that attract vast numbers of searches every single day, which could be providing your website with lucrative sales.
While it isn't rocket science, search engine optimisation requires some hard work, smart strategy and patience, in order to achieve the substantial growth in targeted traffic that is possible for your business.
As more and more website owners become aware of SEO, it is vital that you have an online strategy to market your website effectively using an SEO expert with experience in successful campaigns.
Some of the more common methods of SEO are listed below, and if you follow these, you could be well on your way to increasing your targeted traffic.
Keyword analysis
Often overlooked, this is the most critical stage of any SEO or internet marketing campaign or strategy. Knowing what your users are searching for around the world is vital to increasing targeted leads and turnover. If you are focusing on keywords that you think are important, instead of using professional tools to find out what users are physically typing into the major search engines, then you are wasting your time and money.
Analysing your keywords is of paramount importance and you should engage people around you for their ideas on keywords, until you build up a complete picture of possible keywords and thin filter out the ones that are not being searched for.
Meta tag optimisation
By properly optimising the meta tags of your website, you are effectively informing the search engines what the subject and content of your site is. This also helps traffic to your site from search engine requests in the major search engines. Optimised properly, you can attract more visitors using this basic, but often overlooked essential area of SEO.
Content
Good content is precisely what the majority of visitors and search engines want to see. If your website is to appeal to users, then your site should have fresh, relevant, targeted content that is there to provide a benefit to the visitor.
Whether you employ a copywriter, a consultant or an expert in search engine optimisation, you must have well-written, compelling and above all unique content, to stand a chance in the ever competitive internet.
This is just three examples of how an SEO expert would increase your traffic, leads and turnover. To get a full insight into how to obtain top 10 rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, speak to your local expert and find out what business you could be generating from this highly rewarding area of Internet marketing.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: KEYWORD PLACEMENT FOR MAXIMUM RESULTS
I had a person in my office the other day looking to improve their Web site and their search engine visibility.
He said, “I had this idea, see, where we would put all the keywords we wanted to use over and over again in white text on a white background. Then, the search engines would rank us near the top but it wouldn’t clutter up our page.”
I explained that this was a great idea, presuming he had a time machine and could return to early 1997—the last time this technique actually worked.
Search engines are getting smarter all the time. If you’re looking for a long-term success strategy that will allow you to concentrate on building your business rather than chasing the next search engine bait-and-switch, you need to know where to place your keywords for maximum results.
Before You Begin
Placing the wrong keywords in the right places won’t help your search engine visibility. Start with a keyword analysis to determine which keyword phrases will be most effective on your site.
Tools like Keyword Discovery and WordTracker will help you determine how much competition you have for specific keywords, and how often people are searching for phrases. It will also prepare alternatives and variations of your keywords so that you can cast a wider net. Once you have your list of effective keywords it’s time to put them in their place.
Titles
Titles are one of the few things search engine experts agree on. They’re probably the most important variable for search engine optimization (SEO). And yet, you may never have noticed them before.
That’s because titles appear not on the Web page itself, but rather in the aptly named title bar. If you’re on a Windows machine, this is where you see the minimize, maximize and close buttons. If you’re on a Mac, it’s where the red, yellow and green buttons reside.
You should front load your titles with your best keywords. In other words, “Recycled Paper Goods from XYZ Corp” beats “XYZ Corp: Recycled Paper Goods” for a search on “recycled paper goods,” all other things being equal.
Additionally, you should make sure that each page of your Web site has a unique title. Not only is a duplicate title a missed opportunity, it can be a red flag to the search engines that want to avoid indexing duplicate content.
Finally, make sure your titles read well. Titles appear as the big, blue link on most search engine results pages, and if they’re an unintelligible glom of keywords, people are less likely to click on them.
Headers
Headers and sub-headers are the “titles” that appear in the Web page. They are usually bigger and bolder than the rest of the text, and summarize the themes of the paragraphs that follow. Most experts agree that they carry more weight than the rest of the body copy.
Headers should reflect the title of the page, but shouldn’t be identical. This is because a variation of the title can help you cast a wider net, and also because duplication of title and header can appear “spammy” or “over-optimized” to the search engines.
Body Copy
Your page-specific, keyword-rich body copy is also important. You should be using your keyword-rich phrases and variations, too. Your copy also needs to read well. Bold and italics can help the reader scan the material for the most important ideas, and some experts believe this can also affect the search engine ranking of the page.
Intra-Site Links
Search engines give extra-weight to the words used in an intra-site link (from one page to another within your site) and--to a lesser degree--the words around the link. So, instead of “learn more” or “click here”, use keyword-rich links such as, “Southern Maine Landscaping,” or “Pesticide-Free Gardening.”
Meta-Descriptions
Meta-descriptions don’t appear on the page, but rather in the source code. The only time people will see them is on the search engine results page under the big, blue title tag link.
There’s some debate on whether meta-descriptions help with your rankings, (I think they have little to no value,) but a well-crafted meta-description on a search results page may get a person to click on your link rather than a competitor’s. Think of this as a short ad; what will compel a Google-user to click on your link?
Like title tags, meta-descriptions should be unique and reflect the content on the page.
Meta-Keywords
Got that time machine ready? Search engines give no weight to meta-keywords anymore. We generally recommend creating a list of keywords and using the same list throughout the site because they’re a giant waste of time!
In Conclusion
Of course, there's a lot more nitty-gritty work that needs to be done in a competitive niche, but by placing your best keywords in the right places you can greatly increase your search engine visibility.
If you’d like help in running a keyword analysis on your own site, or would like to improve your site’s search engine visibility, contact flyte today.
--Rich Brooks
President, flyte new media
He said, “I had this idea, see, where we would put all the keywords we wanted to use over and over again in white text on a white background. Then, the search engines would rank us near the top but it wouldn’t clutter up our page.”
I explained that this was a great idea, presuming he had a time machine and could return to early 1997—the last time this technique actually worked.
Search engines are getting smarter all the time. If you’re looking for a long-term success strategy that will allow you to concentrate on building your business rather than chasing the next search engine bait-and-switch, you need to know where to place your keywords for maximum results.
Before You Begin
Placing the wrong keywords in the right places won’t help your search engine visibility. Start with a keyword analysis to determine which keyword phrases will be most effective on your site.
Tools like Keyword Discovery and WordTracker will help you determine how much competition you have for specific keywords, and how often people are searching for phrases. It will also prepare alternatives and variations of your keywords so that you can cast a wider net. Once you have your list of effective keywords it’s time to put them in their place.
Titles
Titles are one of the few things search engine experts agree on. They’re probably the most important variable for search engine optimization (SEO). And yet, you may never have noticed them before.
That’s because titles appear not on the Web page itself, but rather in the aptly named title bar. If you’re on a Windows machine, this is where you see the minimize, maximize and close buttons. If you’re on a Mac, it’s where the red, yellow and green buttons reside.
You should front load your titles with your best keywords. In other words, “Recycled Paper Goods from XYZ Corp” beats “XYZ Corp: Recycled Paper Goods” for a search on “recycled paper goods,” all other things being equal.
Additionally, you should make sure that each page of your Web site has a unique title. Not only is a duplicate title a missed opportunity, it can be a red flag to the search engines that want to avoid indexing duplicate content.
Finally, make sure your titles read well. Titles appear as the big, blue link on most search engine results pages, and if they’re an unintelligible glom of keywords, people are less likely to click on them.
Headers
Headers and sub-headers are the “titles” that appear in the Web page. They are usually bigger and bolder than the rest of the text, and summarize the themes of the paragraphs that follow. Most experts agree that they carry more weight than the rest of the body copy.
Headers should reflect the title of the page, but shouldn’t be identical. This is because a variation of the title can help you cast a wider net, and also because duplication of title and header can appear “spammy” or “over-optimized” to the search engines.
Body Copy
Your page-specific, keyword-rich body copy is also important. You should be using your keyword-rich phrases and variations, too. Your copy also needs to read well. Bold and italics can help the reader scan the material for the most important ideas, and some experts believe this can also affect the search engine ranking of the page.
Intra-Site Links
Search engines give extra-weight to the words used in an intra-site link (from one page to another within your site) and--to a lesser degree--the words around the link. So, instead of “learn more” or “click here”, use keyword-rich links such as, “Southern Maine Landscaping,” or “Pesticide-Free Gardening.”
Meta-Descriptions
Meta-descriptions don’t appear on the page, but rather in the source code. The only time people will see them is on the search engine results page under the big, blue title tag link.
There’s some debate on whether meta-descriptions help with your rankings, (I think they have little to no value,) but a well-crafted meta-description on a search results page may get a person to click on your link rather than a competitor’s. Think of this as a short ad; what will compel a Google-user to click on your link?
Like title tags, meta-descriptions should be unique and reflect the content on the page.
Meta-Keywords
Got that time machine ready? Search engines give no weight to meta-keywords anymore. We generally recommend creating a list of keywords and using the same list throughout the site because they’re a giant waste of time!
In Conclusion
Of course, there's a lot more nitty-gritty work that needs to be done in a competitive niche, but by placing your best keywords in the right places you can greatly increase your search engine visibility.
If you’d like help in running a keyword analysis on your own site, or would like to improve your site’s search engine visibility, contact flyte today.
--Rich Brooks
President, flyte new media
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Could Flash search change internet marketing rules?
by ClickThrough
New developments in Flash search indexing could lead to significant changes in search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies.
Adobe has revealed that it is providing its Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to help the two engines make improvements to their search indexing of Flash SWF file formats.
This could eventually lead to greater visibility of Flash content to search engines, helping web users to find more of the kind of information they are looking for, Adobe said.
According to Mashable, this development could rewrite the rules of SEO, which have historically suggested that those looking to improve search rankings should avoid Flash content as it is not easily picked up by engines.
"We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the web and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users," commented David Wadhwani of Adobe.
Google has already started rolling out the Flash Player technology across its engine and has developed an algorithm that looks at text in Flash elements such as buttons and banners, according to a recent Official Google Blog posting.
New developments in Flash search indexing could lead to significant changes in search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies.
Adobe has revealed that it is providing its Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to help the two engines make improvements to their search indexing of Flash SWF file formats.
This could eventually lead to greater visibility of Flash content to search engines, helping web users to find more of the kind of information they are looking for, Adobe said.
According to Mashable, this development could rewrite the rules of SEO, which have historically suggested that those looking to improve search rankings should avoid Flash content as it is not easily picked up by engines.
"We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the web and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users," commented David Wadhwani of Adobe.
Google has already started rolling out the Flash Player technology across its engine and has developed an algorithm that looks at text in Flash elements such as buttons and banners, according to a recent Official Google Blog posting.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)