The SEMNE organization landed an incredible opportunity last week with a guest lecture from Dan Crow. I’ve seen Dan speak once before several years ago and was shocked by his overly secretive conduct. Thankfully, Google, and apparently, Dan, have changed a lot since then. He had some remarkable things to share with the SEMNE group and, thanks to Jill Whalen’s post (Getting Into Google), the rest of us as well:
We were also treated to some additional tips that many people may not have known about. For instance, did you know that you could stop Google from showing any snippet of your page in the search engine results by using a “nosnippet” tag? And you can also stop Google from showing a cached version of your page via the “noarchive” tag. Dan doesn’t recommend these for most pages since snippets are extremely helpful to visitors, as is showing the cache. However, Google understands that there are certain circumstances where you may want to turn those off.
Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site.
Lastly, Dan mentioned that Google still isn’t doing a great job of indexing content that is contained within Flash and/or AJAX. He said that you should definitely limit your use of these technologies for content that you want indexed. He provided a bit of information regarding Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR), and explained that when used in the manner for which it was intended, it’s a perfectly acceptable solution for Google.
As an aside, I’d like to point out that Dan’s approval of the sIFR mechanism, which replaces HTML text (shown to search engines in the code) with Flash text (more visually customizable), strongly suggests that CSS image replacement is also an acceptable practice. However, I believe that Google’s position on both methods for customizing visuals of text on a website would demand that the readable text in both cases exactly match – this isn’t a good way to create hidden text, just a good way to improve user experience. Jill’s post continues:
Dan provided us with some insights as to what the supplemental results were and how you could get your URLs out of them. He explained that basically the supplemental index is where they put pages that have low PageRank (the real kind) or ones that don’t change very often. These pages generally don’t show up in the search results unless there are not enough relevant pages in the main results to show. He had some good news to report: Google is starting to crawl the supplemental index more often, and soon the distinction between the main index and the supplemental index will be blurring. For now, to get your URLs back into the main results, he suggested more incoming links
This is some excellent material from Dan and serves as further evidence of increasing lines of communication between webmasters and Google. I’m crossing my fingers that Yahoo!, MSN & Ask make similar strides in the near future. And, clearly, Seattle needs its own professional search marketing organization.
p.s. Jill’s requested that the following accompany any quoting of the post:
CEO and founder of High Rankings®, Jill Whalen has been performing search engine optimization since 1995 and is the host of the free High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter, author of “The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines” and founder/administrator of the popular High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum. In 2006, Jill co-founded SEMNE, a localsearch engine marketing networking organizationfor people and companies in New England.
