May 12, 2005
In
This Issue:
1. How Not to Advertise
2. In the News - Google's Web Accelerator
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - Crawling dynamic content
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
How Not to Advertise
[rant on]
No doubt you've encountered pop-up ads and pop-under
ads as you surf the web. They are, without doubt,
one of the worst inventions ever. There's a term
the ad industry uses for things like those; sadly,
I can't remember the term, so I'm going to call
them "nuisance ads." They get in your
way. They're the reason why ISPs and browser developers
advertise the availability of Pop-up Blockers.
People don't like that kind of advertising.
There's a new trend you may have seen, quite likely
on a news site if you read those. The ad isn't
a pop-up that can be blocked, but it appears and
covers some of the content you're trying to view.
Talk about annoying! And then a week or two ago,
I saw the most egregious example of this kind
of advertising yet while reading InternetNews.com,
one of the sites I check regularly:
http://www.owtweb.com/resources/056.jpg
Yes, that's an actual screenshot. A good 40% of
the viewable content is covered by this ad, and
the ad took a good 15 seconds to fully load. I'm
not in the market for IP telephony equipment,
but if I was, I'd do my best to find some other
provider than the company that's killing my news
reading like this.
[rant off]
What's this have to do with search and web development?
Well, aside from the obvious "Don't do what
they do" is this: Nuisance advertising will
probably never go away, not as long as someone
thinks the best way to reach people is to get
in their faces and shout loudly. But search is
the advertising industry's "in thing"
right now, for great reason: Search advertising
ties the ads directly to what's being searched
for, and presents the ads in a user-friendly,
unobtrusive way. Relevant search ads actually
HELP the search experience -- you want to see
them, or you don't mind seeing them. Compare that
to nuisance ads like the one above, or even TV
ads that get TiVO'ed out, and it's no wonder search
advertising is the golden goose right now.
(On a semi-related note, I have to share this
link to a really
great print ad.)
_________________
In The News
Google's Web Accelerator
Google last week introduced a tool designed to
help you surf the web faster. Say what? It sounds
odd that a search engine would get into ISP-related
issues, but the Google Web Accelerator is a downloadable
tool that lets broadband users tap into Google's
worldwide computer network for a more efficient
surfing experience.
Google
Web Accelerator
The announcement triggered immediate privacy concerns
from people and groups concerned that Google would
have a (larger) window at knowing what pages its
users are looking at. Reaction: millions of people
already use the Google Toolbar, which gives Google
that same information, so this is nothing new.
I don't believe Google really cares about associating
web pages and the behavior of individuals. But
I do think they care about using these kinds of
tools to discover new web pages they haven't indexed
before. Tristan Louis hits the nail on the head
with a recent commentary about the Web Accelerator.
Worth a read, and even offers an easy-to-read
overview of how search engines work for those
who don't quite undderstand it all just yet.
Tristan Louis: Google
Accelerates Search
_________________
More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time to read.
These are just some of the headlines we've posted
to OWTweb.com in recent
days.
CSS
102: Borders and Backgrounds
May 05, 2005 - Digital Web
MSN
Search share anyone's guess
May 05, 2005 - InternetNews.com
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
This Week's Q&A
Hi Matt,
We have a commerce site that sells a lot of products
spread across several different areas (or categories,
I guess). Our products are all stored in a database
that allows us to create very informative, keyword-rich
product pages. But we're finding that very few,
if any, of these pages are actually being found
by Google or any other search engine. Can you
look at our web site and tell me what we're doing
wrong?
Jennifer
Hi Jennifer --
Search engines are much better now at finding
and indexing dynamic (databased) content than
they were a few years ago. But it's still not
a slam dunk. The main stumbling block many sites
(yours included) face is the site search box --
i.e., the only way to get to the products is by
using the site search. A search engine spider
might get to your home page just fine, but it
can't execute a search for "green widgets"
to find your product pages.
This newsletter isn't the right venue for a real
site review, but I can say in general that the
best way to help crawlers find dynamic content
is to provide a static link to that content. In
other words, you do a search for "green widgets"
on your site, and then take that URL and make
it a static link in your main site menu that the
crawlers can find and follow. If you have too
many categories to make this feasible, then you
create a page called "Product Categories"
that looks like this:
Green Widgets (links to green
widgets in your database)
Purple Widgets (links to purple
widgets)
Yellow Widgets (etc.)
General Widget Accessories
etc.
And then your main site menu links to this new
Categories page. This will help the crawler find
that content that's been hidden behind the search
box.
There are other concerns related to your database
query strings and such, and I hope to cover those
in an upcoming article on OWTweb.com.
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
We're a day late thanks to some minor computer problems here.
Yesterday was "upgrade Matt's computer to
the new Mac Tiger OS" day, but my hard drive
took a flyer before we could even start. Very
odd, but all fixed now. And Tiger is pretty cool,
too!
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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