From the Google blog:

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 Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

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So does this mean we will start to see a whole load of flash sites in our search results? I doubt it since even though flash sites look nice, many don’t actually have all that great textual content for the end user.

Still, good work by Google.

I was waiting for a while to see if this would happen and now it seems it has indeed. A few days ago Rebecca Kelly from SEOMoz wrote a blog post recapping the in’s and out’s of SMX Advanced 2008. In the second paragraph she mentions that i visted the SEOMoz office and also links to Ayima.com using the link text Dean Chew.

Now Ayima.com ranks 2nd for Dean Chew, even though there is no mention of my name on the site, the Ayima site doesn’t link to this blog, and i dont link to the Ayima site. The only relationship between Dean Chew and Ayima.com is from Rebecca’s post.

Wikipedia describes a Google Bomb as…

A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.[1] Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text.

Now, i was under the impression that Google had really tried to stamp out the process of Google Bombing, and obviously whilst this particular case isn’t bombing (as Rebecca was simply linking to a site she knew i had a relationship with) it does indicate that with smaller volume terms such as Dean Chew the process may still work.

Here is a screen shot of the results

Now i wonder that since i have mentioned my own name in this post so many times, if i will now have the 2nd position indent for Dean Chew? Only time will tell.

I will ask Rebecca to change the link to point to this blog and keep note of how long it takes for the Ayima result to drop off so if you a reading this like a week after its posted, the results are probably not the same.

Ahhh, good old Yahoo, first they are getting bought out by the Microsoft ogre, then they are not, maybe thats why it is taking them so damn long to change a domain name in the SERPS listing even though i placed a 301 redirect on it about 3 months ago.

I have a fashion website which sells high end clothes, mainly aimed at the rich housewife market, hopefully some of them are MILFS but obviously i haven’t actually seen any of the customers. Anyway, i bought the domain name www.boden-mini-sale.co.uk, not surprisingly Boden weren’t to happy about that so they kindly asked me to change my domain or i’ll get kicked off the affiliate program. I agreed and immediately placed a 301 redirect from the domain to www.fashionable-clothing.co.uk/boden.

The big G picked up on the 301 and changed the listing in the SERPS in about 2 days, Yahoo on the other hand flat out refuses to update their SERPS and still shows the domain as the old one.

Below is an uber advanced photoshop’d image showing Yahoo’s defiance…

So there you have it, (for what ever reason i can’t work out Yahoo) will not update the SERPS to show the new domain and has no other pages from the new site indexed. When i search for the domain, Yahoo tells me…

We did not find results for: www.fashionable-clothing.co.uk/boden. Try the suggestions below or type a new query above.

Damn you Yahoo! Damn you.