Digital Likeness » search

Search Strategy for RIAs – Social promotion

Andrea Hill — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:15:49 +0000

Have you heard of the Burger Angry-gram from the factory workers at Crispin Porter + Bogusky? If not, you may have just googled it to learn more. But what do you see?

With interactive experiences built in Flash like the angry-gram, you may find one sole search result for the site itself, with many more references from other sources about the campaign. There are a few reasons for this, and they help illustrate why SEO and social media are becoming increasingly interconnected.

Typically, SEO is focused on page-level optimization. Pages are developed in anticipation of the user using particular search terms. However, an application built in Flash like the angry-gram doesn’t have the same concept of pages. The site may appear to have navigation, but a quick glance at the URL shows that it doesn’t change; as far as google spiders are concerned, this is the same “page” and will not get indexed separately.

Now, this may not be a bad thing. In the case of rich internet applications, the “application” is key. It may not make sense for a search results page to link a visitor part way into the process of creating an angry-gram: there may need to be a logical progression.

So what can you do if you want people to be able to discover your campaign?
If the steps within the application themselves cannot show up in search engine results, you can work to ensure that information ABOUT the application shows up.

Look again at the search results page for angry-gram – there are plenty of blog posts and social networking site links to the campaign. An engaging campaign like the Angry-gram has to stand on its own legs, but embarking on a social media marketing campaign can help to generate buzz and coverage, which will ultimately drive people to the site.

We caution ourselves not to judge a book by its cover, and only allowing google to index the landing page of a rich internet application forces us to do just that: we cannot get a sense of what’s inside from the search engine results page (SERP). In selecting a book to purchase, we read reviews and solicit opinions from others. Embarking on a social media marketing campaign is essentially soliciting those reviews, so that potential visitors can gain insights into what your applications offers, regardless if google itself is able to index the experience.

Will social media render search engines obsolete?

Andrea Hill — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:30:26 +0000

When I speak about how social media is changing expectations, I often focus on the change in information gathering and seeking. With over 1.6 million new posts a day, and 6 million twitter accounts, there is an overabundance of information available. The challenge to effective information gathering online is no longer search, it’s filter.

We used to solicit advice and guidance from our trusted friends, and then many of us started to turn to search engines for more information from a wider pool of resources. Now with the wealth of information indexed by the search engines, social media has seen many folks return to asking trusted associates for guidance and referrals. Couple that with all the recent declarations that twitter is starting to scoop traditional media, we have to ask: are search engines still relevant?

Now, I’m not so presumptuous to say that they are no longer useful. But are they being used differently? I had a theory: that social media was being used in very specific instances, as a complement to social media. Interested to know if this was plausible, I floated my idea by Ari Newman, Founder and President of Filtrbox.

My thought had been that people turned to social media outlets to seek out opinion, gossip, and breaking news. The focus is on immediacy or opinion rather than fact. The intent of the information seeker is reflected in the channels they use to discover the information, which has immediate implications on the information they actually find. With the glut of information out there, we are sure to find something that supports our beliefs!

It occurred to me that there may be some sort of cycle: we first hear of a topic through the rapid messaging of social media; then we seek out more information from credible sources, and lastly we return to social media to share our own thoughts and opinions. Social media channels makes it easy to discover new areas of interest, as we are bombarded with rapid messaging via RSS or twitter. The information is naturally shallow, but it may encourage someone to seek out more information if they are interested. It is more about discovery and raising awareness than really educating.

I think you can now even separate Twitter vs “social media” when monitoring buzz and trending topics. Something is going to flash up on Twitter a day before it hits TechMeme, or hours before even Huffington Post picks it up. …there is a trend where topics break or “flash” on Twitter, then gain more blog coverage, then hit online Mainstream press
-Ari Newman, Filtrbox

Ari also pointed out another subtle nuance between social media and search engine searches, related to the idea of setting up alerts or monitoring. Social media monitoring (and responding to what is discovered) is becoming increasingly recognized as a way to understand brand perception in the marketplace and deal with customer queries or complaints. Persistent queries can be configured to send out notifications when particular terms are mentioned on social media sites or services: Filtrbox, Techrigy and Radian6 are some examples of monitoring services. Generally, these sorts of alerts are restricted in relation to time: they will only return references within a given time frame. Therefore, such searches not only bring back the specific references, but also offer additional information on the current interest in the subject. Such alerts may therefore offer information on how sentiment and number of references change over time (again, with timeliness of the information being significant). This is in contrast to a more traditional search, which places more emphasis on the “authority” of the content than how recently it was published.

So while social media outlets offer us rapid access to information, and additional context around the immediate interest in a given term, it does not resolve concerns about source credibility, and the view on the information is naturally of limited duration. Just as we seek out the advice of friends or the recommendations of Google’s PageRank algorithm to help guide us in our information seeking, so too must we make the informed decision as to which information channel we use to search based on our ultimate intent.

SEO is dead, long live Social Media?

Andrea Hill — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:53:12 +0000

Yesterday at the Thin Air Summit, I attended a panel entitled “Search Engine Optimization with New Media.” Panelists were Brett Borders, Elizabeth Yarnell and John Fischer, and the session was moderated by Micah Baldwin.

The presentation consisted of a slide overview by Brett, some general recommendations by the other panelists, and then a few brave audience members submitted their URLs for review.

This is the second time I’ve heard Brett speak, and I am always impressed with his depth of knowledge. At lunch he’d mentioned that he’s actually looking to shift from reputation management and SEO to social media promotion.

This shift makes sense to me, although I don’t feel as strongly as Micah, who, after the conference, boldly stated on twitter that If you do SEO for a living, you will be out of business or irrelevant in 3 years.

He elaborated in a blog post today, that he feels that “the act of SEO – adjusting the code and content of a website with the primary purpose to be ranked highly in search results, is on its way out.”

For me, a site optimized for a search engine that employs clear language, semantically-correct mark-up and content that can be interpreted by a non-human reader is going to offer a better user experience for everyone.

One of the fundamental premises of social media is the notion of reputation and recommendation. Before the Internet, we looked to our local social circle for advice or guidance. With the Internet came this glut of information, and we had access to much more information. The challenge is no longer “search”, it’s “filter”. I can find hundreds or thousands of results to my query, but how do I find those that are most relevant or informative? We are now looking back to our social circles for guidance in these matters: the difference is that our social circles now have the possibility to be significantly larger.

So is SEO still relevant? Yes, because someone still needs to be the initial “finder” of the information. Optimizing a site for search engines can help humans find and categorize content, as well. How often do you run a search for a specific article or site you know you’ve seen before? Search is not only for the discovery of new content, it can also serve to recover previously visited content. Yet if you don’t recall the exact terminology on the site, or all the content of the site is cloaked in images, your task will be more difficult.

As content providers, do we not want our content to be available to anyone who wishes to find it? Therefore, we would do well to optimize: for search engines, for screen readers, for human consumers. It’s not just search engines that benefit from a well-crafted title tag, so too do the people you want to attract.

Some of the folks I heard from this weekend stated simply that SEO was boring, and social media was more interesting. But the enjoyment of performing a job should not be correlated with the necessity of its completion. Creating a site that is easily indexed and recoverable is never a negative thing, although I will admit that there are other factors that should also be considered in site design, development and promotion.

Micah’s perspective appeared hinged on the fact that SEO should not be the duty of an external consultant or agency, which does fall in line with my views of user experience and accessibility. These are core principles that should be considered throughout the project, from inception through implementation. But I feel it is not suffering from death, but rather on the cusp of a rebirth of legitimacy, wherein planning for accessibility and indexability will become standard practice.

Google devaluing Human-Filtered Directories?

Andrea Hill — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:03:50 +0000

At the Mile High Social Media Club meeting tonight, speaker Brett Borders mentioned that the google webmaster guidelines had been recently updated to remove a recommendation to submit to “relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.” I tweeted this nugget of information, and @theguigirl asked if I had any more information.

I don’t, officially, but I can speculate, and I also googled

When DMOZ was brought up at the session, I volunteered that I had been an editor back in the day, and I guessed that the recent update to the guidelines was due to the lack of democracy-an editor can maintain their section autonomously. Indeed, I was solicited to serve as editor when I submitted a site I maintained. When the volunteer pool is folks who have a vested interest in their own site(s) being promoted, how objective can you really expect the directory to be? While there are certainly ways to “game” digg and stumble-upon, at the very least one some level the wisdom of the crowd should offer some level of checks and balances.

A secondary consideration is the whole basis of google – the PageRank algorithm (math and stats and computer science). I’ve read a fair amount from the google folks, and it appears their preference is to automate, automate, automate. Yahoo! was a human-powered directory that was super-ceded by Google because Google was able to offer better, more accurate results, more quickly. PageRank is based on authority: inbound vs outbound links, and the quality thereof. As a directory, DMOZ links out far more than it’s linked to. The algorithm must therefore be tweaked to assign a weighting to a directory like this. So how much ‘authority’ do you assign to a listing in DMOZ, when they let anyone, even Canadian college kids, be editors?

I do recall a bit of an uproar months ago about a blog post that claimed that Google was to punish pagerank for digg stories. Although it’s never really been verified as coming from a legitimate Google source, the warning seems to make some sense: sources that were found to be manipulating social bookmarking sites to unfairly promote sites would be blocked. Don’t be evil, kids, and you’ll be fine.

What I feel makes the story really interesting, however, is the buzz shortly following that Google was planning to acquire digg. Was the “leaked” blog post a way to devalue digg in the eyes of SEO folks? Or does google really recognize the importance of social bookmarking? A Stanford 2008 survey actually found that 25% of the sites posted to del.icio.us have not yet been indexed by the major search engines. That’s pretty amazing. I would love to have seen if Google incorporated digg rankings into their algorithm, or kept digg as a complimentary service and simply used it to help find new sites to index more quickly. Assigning authority to individual users would be very, very interesting!

So why did Google update their guidelines? Hard to say. But it may be because:

Google sees directories as having equal credibility as other sources, so there is no need to distinguish them in the guidelines
Google sees human-classified directories as having less credibility than other sites
The Google algorithm needs to take into account many more sources than simply directories like Yahoo! and DMOZ
Google wants the demise of all non-Google entities

Spiders don’t use Screen Readers (SEO vs Web Accessibility)

Andrea Hill — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:18:04 +0000

How often have you been asked “so if we don’t use Flash, this will be searchable/accessible, right”? As though there is some new compound word describing a site whose content is easily available to all non-human user agents.

Ah, we should be so lucky! While some coding practices aid in both SEO and web accessibility, there are some fundamental differences between the practices.

One of the most basic differences is the intent. When looking at a web project, it is completely acceptable to prioritize as to which content you want to be indexed for a search engine—for example, a company may not care if their short-lived events data gets indexed. SEO is about attracting traffic to your site. In contrast, web accessibility is about ensuring an individual can use your site once he’s on it.

Up until, oh, two weeks ago, Flash was commonly considered to be unsearchable. A way to ensure the content of the site could still be indexed (and therefore show up in google) was to write the content to the HTML page, and then if the visitor had Flash available, overlay the static text with a richer experience. This worked fine to allow a search engine spider to index the content, however, it didn’t always provide a user of assistive technology a good experience.

There is a common belief that users of assistive technologies don’t or can’t access Flash, so they would get the stripped down, text-only version. This isn’t always the case, they may get the Flash-enabled version, like other human visitors. Well, except their actual experience is significantly different..

For anyone who has never seen a screen reader in action, I highly recommend you check out this Introduction to Screen Readers movie.

Flash has had accessibility properties available to developers since Flash MX, and Adobe Flex provides built-in “accessible components.” However, unlike the recent announcement about .swf indexing not requiring any additional effort on the behalf of developers, creating an accessible .swf experience does require some work. As well, accessibility for .swfs depends on MSAA (Microsoft Active Accessibility), so it is platform dependent. Even a diligent developer will find his hard work is all for naught if his visitor is on a MAC.

As you can see, “searchable” and “accessible” cannot be used interchangeably. While the tactics for each don’t necessarily conflict, there are different goals and different considerations to take into account.

what’s the deal with… personalization

Andrea Hill — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:52:24 +0000

Personalization is the idea of tailoring an experience to a specific individual. This is particularly prevalent in e-Commerce. There are a few ways to achieve this.

The ATG e-Commerce platform uses ‘a scenario engine’ to provide personalized content. The engine uses a rules-based system, either based on user attributes or user behaviour. These can be simple (“the user has set her preference to be movies, so we will show her movie-related content”) or incredibly complicated (“in the past week, the user has clicked on at least three movies and at least four television shows, so we will show her randomly served up movie or tv-related content”).

Such rules-based systems are powerful, but they also necessitate a fair amount of planning and development. ATG actually recommends a specific job role dedicated to writing and configuring such rules. So what if you’re not entirely sure what the specific rules you need are?

An alternative that is gaining ground is based on Bayesian probabilistic theory. Don’t worry, there’s no need to actually know the name of it Bayesian theory “us[es] the knowledge of prior events to predict future events.[1]” This is the basis of the Cleverset product recommendation offering (Cleverset has now been purchased by ATG to round out its offering). Bayesian theory is (perhaps unsurprisingly) well-discussed within academic circles. A few example papers include: “Online Recommendation Based on Customer Shopping Model in E-Commerce”, or “Website Morphing”.

Many people have an amazon.com recommendation story: they purchased a baby item once as a gift, and continue to have baby items recommended to them on each visit. A rules-based system such as ATG allows you to set thresholds (you must buy at least three baby items – perhaps even on three different visits – to have baby items recommended). A system that uses Bayesian reasoning basically modifies itself based on your behaviour to predict the likelihood of your buying another baby item.

The above example is based on targeting content to a user, based on activity. When I first came across an article referencing Website Morphing, I was quite intrigued. Rather that focusing on content, Bayesian theory is applied to the cognitive style of the visitor. Whereas our goal for a particular site visit may change, we all have preferred learning styles. How I choose to gather information on a site can dynamically modify how it is presented to me (I am adverse to video tutorials, so I will enjoy a site more if that information is provided differently). According to the MIT Sloan professors that are doing this work, “morphing websites can increase sales 20 percent [2].” I have been in email contact with the author of the paper, and he states that they have continued to try out their system in limited markets, and continue to see the same positive results.

Personalization is one step in providing an optimized user experience. When looking to incorporate personalization into an experience, consideration must be made both as to the specific approach as well as the nature of the personalization (is it content or presentation that is tailored).

[1] What is Bayesian Logic? retrieved July 7, 2008 from http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci548993,00.html
[2] MIT Sloan Professors Find That Morphing Websites Can Increase Sales 20 Percent retrieved July 7, 2008 from http://rismedia.com/wp/2008-05-22/mit-sloan-professors-find-that-morphing-websites-can-increase-sales-20-percent/

Flash Indexing

Andrea Hill — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:27:55 +0000

As a previously scheduled post on accessibility and indexability went live, a few folks pointed me to some news on searchable/indexable swfs.

A few of the articles I checked out:

I will admit I referred to the articles with a critical eye; google has been flirting with retrieving some amount of content from .swfs for quite awhile. Yet for the first time, I got a sense there has been real progress.

The premise is that Google and Yahoo! spiders will access the content via an enhanced Flash player. This enhanced player will give the search engine spiders the ability to navigate within the Flash experience, and access and index associated resources.

This is an exciting prospect, as until now many site designers were resigned to duplicating the content that was available from within Flash on the HTML page wrapper that housed the Flash. This followed the web development strategy of ‘progressive enhancement‘, where a non-flash-enabled site visitor (like the Googlebot) would be able to access at least the core content, and the more capabilities the visitor possessed (CSS, rich media), the more enhanced their experience. In addition to potentially increasing maintenance costs (to ensure the two versions were in sync), implementing this method is sometimes not feasible at all, depending on the complexity of the application.

I was eager to see how what I knew about Flash accessibility best practices came into play, and eagerly read through the documentation. As I did so, however, I found I had more questions than answers. In the Google Webmaster Central Blog, there is an intriguing statement:

we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.

When I first read this, I believed it meant that some links may not be followed. This makes sense from the standpoint that a button with no associated text would essentially be a hidden link, and following it may inaccurately represent the content of the site. However, the statement actually focuses on the generation of anchor text. I am not clear where this generation would take place; perhaps in a virtual buffer of all the Flash content? How does the content of the link (assuming that it DOES get followed) get associated with the overall Flash content (since there is no anchor text).

Another consideration is the use of tabindices. When coding Flash for accessibility, tabindices may be used to specify reading order. Is this something that search engine spiders will be aware of? Equally, there is a recommendation in the Google docs to “consider replacing the text within an image.. [to make] ..less informative content.. invisible to [Google]“.
This statement made me question of the sophistication of this enhanced player. For years, Google has managed to determine that items such as copyright statements are not significant content items. So why now are they unaware of this fact now that the content is coming from a .swf? The recommendation to move content from an accessible to an inaccessible form seems terribly shortsighted and irresponsible.
We are now quite sophisticated in using semantic markup for html pages to offer search engine spiders some information about the relative importance of elements.I can only assume that all text being pulled from a Flash element is given equal weighting. If this is the case, as is noted in the Adobe Developer Center documentation we will certainly need to see “best practices emerge over time for creating SWF content that is more optimized for search engine rankings”.

Another major challenge in opening applications up to search is being able to direct the searcher to the relevant section within the experience. This is also a concern with accessible PDFs. Much of the documentation recommended the use of deep-linking. However, it’s not clear to me how the spider is made aware of these deep-links. I will admit that my own exposure to deep-linking with a flash experience is limited: we did this for the People’s Choice Awards site, where querystring parameters were fed into the .swf using flashVars. While the Adobe Developer Center documentation mentions this practice (“you can create multiple HTML files that provide different variables to the SWF and start your application at the correct subsection”), I hadn’t been aware that google supported variables in their search result URLs…

There was also some mention made that external files linked to from within the .swf will be indexed, but separately. The implication is that the contents of a data file will show up in search results, separate from its presentational format (and overall context). While I assume this will be resolved in future releases, a diligent developer will likely want to ensure their “include” files are not accessed on their own. I believe my colleagues did something similar when we launched the Wal-Mart Halloween Flash/HTML Hybrid site last year. They did some great work with deep-linking and history management, and handled orphan content loading (I refer anyone interested in the specifics to Toby Miller). My concern is that based on how this functionality was announced (that developers did not need to do anything for their swfs to be indexed), there will be little motivation to ensure content is always delivered in the proper context.

Obviously, I am very interested to see if this development will enhance the experience of users of assistive technologies. Sadly, I’m not sure it will, as the major breakthrough has been made with the enhanced player. Unless Adobe also plans to work with makers of assistive technologies, I don’t know that any of these benefits will be realized. If anything, site designers may stop some of their earlier practices (textual alternatives).

I’m very interested to know if any of the accessibility properties and best practices have made it into this enhanced search — how great would it be if the use of these properties increased the weighting of content!

what’s the deal with… findability, searchability, indexability and accessibility?

Andrea Hill — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:24:09 +0000

As a front-end web developer, I often hear the terms “findable”, “searchable”, “indexable” and “accessible” thrown around interchangeably. For many, they mean that the content can be accessed by a non-human, be it a screen reader or a search engine spider. On some level this is true, but there are several significant differences that are must not be overlooked.

For the sake of this discussion:

Findable: how easily a site can be found when using a search engine (rankings). Yes, I realize that this term also refers to how easily content can be found once the user is on the site, but I’m ignoring that aspect of it for now…
Searchable: how easily specific content within a site can be accessed when using a search engine (deep-linking)
Indexable: how easily the content of a site may be retrieved and used in search engine results
Accessible using AT: how easily someone using assistive technologies can use your site

(ShoeMoney.com has compiled a list of definitions for SEO from some industry experts, as well)

A site created completely in Flash or Flex may be findable thanks to the use of meta-data, but it is not indexable. With some diligent coding, information may be searchable, but this is no guarantee that it will be accessible.

(Not content with these descriptions? Have more to add? Please let me know what you think in the comments!)

As I’ve mentioned, my background is in accessibility: prior to coming to Resource, I worked on large subscription-based web applications. SEO was not a consideration at all. However, accessibility was. When I first came to Resource, I was eager to see how the two complemented and contrasted each other.

Overall, I see some overlap between the areas. However, their focus is different.

SEO is based on a page mentality – this is apparent in the search results that come up. Many common SEO techniques are applied at the page level, via adding meta tags or optimizing title tags. This is how a site that requires login, or is built using a technology like Flash or Flex, can appear in search results. A search engine can access meta information about the page, and use that to rank it. Findability relates to the notion of the discovery of the page itself.

A secondary notion is that of searchability. A web application may be found on google, but can the specific content that is being sought be retrieved? Searchability refers to the idea that site visitor can easily navigate to the specific information he’s searching for within the site, once the site itself has been discovered.

Both searchability and indexability deal with how elements of the page can be accessed, but arguably in different directions. Deeplinking into a flash movie may facilitate searchability, helping a site visitor dig into the site at a specific point. In contrast, indexability refers to the ability of a search engine spider to do a broad pull of content from the site.

Where SEO and Accessibility really start to diverge is when we move beyond the retrieval of content itself. A search engine spider is only interested in the data, so that the appropriate search result may be returned to an information seeker. In contrast, accessibility refers to the ability of a site visitor to navigate within an experience. The implications are significant: each interaction must be coded in a way such that a screen reader user can activate the change, and be notified of any changes that occur.

Another important distinction is the extent to which the site content is made available. A site may work to optimize or only make indexable certain aspects of the site. In contrast, accessibility refers to the ability of all content to be available and able to be engaged with.

The New Image of Search

Andrea Hill — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:52:18 +0000

Recently, Mark Scholl tweeted I need a new picture to satisfy business purposes.. While I realize now that he probably meant a photo of himself, he’s “the search guy” to me, so I first thought that he wanted an icon that represented what he did.
When we think of search, we think of that trusty magnifying glass. But is that really appropriate today? When was the last time you ‘searched’ for something online and had to try really hard to find it? These days our bigger problem is weeding through the huge results set. The problem now isn’t finding something, it’s filtering to find the best thing.
So what’s an icon for a filter? Other than a sieve, of course. The first thing that comes to mind for me is that little org-chart icon, with the boxy-thing above two other boxy-things. But does that really capture “search”?

Artificial Intelligence: a solution for Artificial Content? (Fighting Hidden Keyword Spam)

Andrea Hill — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 06:33:31 +0000

I was recently doing some research for a blog post I’m writing on screen readers vs SEO for the RI:Technology Blog. A 2005 blog post by Matt Cutts from Google entitled “SEO Mistakes: Unwise Comments” solicited many concerns about the use of hidden content being considered keyword spam.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons for hiding text from a sighted user on page load, and in many cases, this is simply a stylistic effect and the content will be surfaced as a result of user interaction. It is not about the use of the technique, but rather the misuse. The official Google Webmaster Guidelines do have a page dedicated to hidden text and links, but it also lists as a basic principle:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

So how do we determine if a technique is being used appropriately? There has always been the old standby technique to disable CSS. Does the page still make sense, or is it littered with content not meant for human consumption? This would solve our concerns about “instructional” help for users of assistive technologies, and the suppression of content until the user opts to display it. (Indeed, it is a progressive enhancement best practice to have the content on the page and then hide it using javascript anyway, so that it is available even if JS is turned off.) This works fine for intelligent human users, but we all know that in GoogleLand, human reviews are NOT a desired goal.

So what about artificial intelligence as an option? Ever so slowly (yet steadily), we are moving forward in the area of natural language processing. What if AI and NLP were used to assess the semantics of page contents? When I access a website, I don’t expect to see a series of keywords. A human accessing a page is looking for content, not keywords describing the content. Some intelligence could be used to identify the overall syntax of the content, to ensure it’s legitimate “Content”.

Naturally, specific page elements would have to be accounted for. A list of navigation links may look suspiciously like keywords. This is where semantic markup comes into play, in particular some of the new tags proposed for HTML5 (nav or section, for example) or roles outlined in WAI-ARIA. A series of (internal) links would be expected in the nav element, but a collection of random words not appearing in proper syntactic form elsewhere in the document would be considered suspect.

Obviously, whenever there are rules, there will be people setting out to break them. But if we are cognizant of how these black hat techniques differ from legitimate best practices, surely we can filter them out as such. It’s a shame to penalize those who are honestly working to enhance the user experience, not cater to search engines.

Or, as Eric Meyer stated at the Spring Break conference last week, the best google juice is having good content so that everyone want to link to you. Do it right, and the hits will come organically..