Micro$oft might be spending $100,000,000 dollars to convince you that they have developed a better search engine than Google, but Google’s I/O conference stirred up some conversations about the ability of Googlebot to crawl JavaScript. That’s a tremendous step forward for search engines. If it’s true it’s also a serious game changing feature; one that should shush those (like myself) who’ve been saying that Google has been neglecting it’s search engine and focusing too much on all the other stuff they’ve been building, buying and giving away. So, it seems that yes Google can and does crawl JavaScript.

Here are some articles that SEO experts should check out.. and you’ll get a whiff of how important JavaScript crawling is:

http://searchengineland.com/google-io-new-advances-in-the-searchability-of-javascript-and-flash-but-is-it-enough-19881

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/no-clarification-forthcoming-from-google-on-nofollow-pagerank-flow

http://searchengineland.com/google-loses-backwards-compatibility-on-paid-link-blocking-pagerank-sculpting-20408

So recently Google officially released longer snippets on search results. There has been some chatter about this depreciating the value of the meta description. I have to play spoiler here and say I disagree.

The extended snippet stuff is great for long tail queries, like the many that I do when looking for programming information. Yet I don’t think it changes the importance of the meta description tag, especially for shorter search phrases.

Short snippets indicate tighter keyword proximity within the optimization of content; more precisely what the searcher is looking for. Longer snippets are only displayed when the keyword proximity is wider, therefore the content might not be precisely what the search is looking for, so that the searcher can better determine if the content on each page might have what they’re searching for.

Here’s some examples of tight keyword proximity within the content of the ranked pages, resulting in mostly short snippets:

“asp.net response.cookie expiration”

“Austin rodeo tickets”

Here’s some examples of loose keyword proximity within the content of the ranked pages, resulting in many long snippets:

“asp.net response.cookie expiration not working”

“can i watch the austin rodeo on tv”

So I stand by my opinion that body content and title tag are equally the best places to optimize for keywords and phrases to increase rankings, while the meta description is the best place to encourage a click through.

a client that we do web hosting for was wanting to report a competitors spam tactics to the various major search engines (i call them the big 3… kinda like Ford,GM,Chrysler were once dubbed, but for the new online information age). anyhow, i figured i’d share these links with everyone in case you ever get an urge to tattle on your competitors for doing the things u want to do… but have to much respect for the online community or too much fear from being banned* to do yourselves.

Google: https://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Yahoo!: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam

MSN: You can do a search for each phrase the site is ranked on, and then click the link near the bottom of the page that says “Help us improve.” Or, you can submit via this form: http://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=search&page=support_home_options_form_byemail&ct=eformts

interesting find >> Google Sitemaps