Google have made a slight change to their webmaster guidelines that could actually be something quite major.
The following lines were removed from their guidelines:
Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
Have other relevant sites link to yours.
For years Google has highly recommended a link in Yahoo! and DMOZ. Having links in these directories was a great benefit to your sites ranking. They also constantly recommended that you built lots of relevant links to your website.
This lead to huge abuse from search engine optimisers, who would simply spamming link farms and directories. What this means for the future is debatable. Maybe Google are going to disregard directories altogether regardless of their importance currently. I doubt they will undermine link value, but I wouldn’t be surprised anymore.
We’ll just have to keep an eye on things and see what happens.
Adobe released a press release today, stating that they are teaming up with search industry leaders, namely Google & Yahoo! to “improve search results of dynamic web content”.
Adobe have given Google & Yahoo! access to the Adobe Flash technology to allow them to improve their ability to index flash files/websites.
So what does this mean for us, the search engine optimisers and web developers? Well at the moment, very little it seems. We’ve all known for quite sometime that Google has been able to follow links and index some content from within a flash flash file. At the moment, all this does is give Google and Yahoo! insider information on how they can get to information, previously unavailable from within the flash file.
Will it make a difference? Will flash websites now have a better change of being indexed? In my opinion, I don’t think this will ever happen. Flash just doesn’t offer the flexibility that plain text based HTML does. You’ve a lot more scope within plain HTML than Flash to optimise your website.
It’s an interesting development, but not one I see making a huge difference for a long time.
So Google and Yahoo! are now partners on search ads huh? My god what next??
I have to say I think it’s a great deal for both parties. Yahoo! can greatly increase the monetisation of their pages, while Google can continue to grow their penetration of the search advertising market.
