This was the question posed to Santiago de la Mora, Google’s European Partnerships Lead, Books, at Editech 2008: Editoria e innovazione tecnologica, Milan, 27 June 2008.

In the article that follows, I’ve attempted to paraphrase Santiago’s presentation of Google’s Book Search based on notes I took during the session. Santiago started by noting his agenda would cover 5 points. As the slide set is not currently available and I couldn’t see it very well from my side seat, I’ve added a few screen shots in an attempt to better illustrate Santiago’s presentation. I’ve also inserted a few personal comments, indicated with italics.

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I just discovered that someone on a Web Analytics discussion group misconstrued the recent Google announcement of better Flash search engine crawling support to mean it is now good to use Flash when developing web sites.

Nothing could be further from the truth. While Google’s move is welcome support for all the legacy Flash websites still in circulation, companies shouldn’t generally be deploying new sites made wholly using Flash.

What Google has announced is significant improvements to their ability to extract information, specifically text and links, from Flash objects. Despite what many are trying to read into this, Google already crawled and extracted this information from Flash only sites – this is not exactly new.

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Last Wednesday I had the fortune to attend a world class conference on social behavior and technology applied to medium and large sized businesses. Not in San Francisco. Not in Boston, where I worked for 4 years. Not in Milan, even. In Varese. Right, Varese, once known more for shoe production. The conference, the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0, was held at L’Università dell’Insubria as part of their 10^th anniversary celebration.

As a search marketing consultant, I was very interested in how the social web is being applied to business environments. The very intertwined nature of the web means that no web marketing project should be seen in isolation. <rant>Thanks to the kind folks at Trenitalia, who canceled my train from Tuscany at the last minute, I almost didn’t make it. Not that you’d find any news about this on their website.</rant>

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The inside scoop on how you can get a competitive advantage by including organic search engine visibility in your marketing mix.

One of the primary goals of traditional advertising is to create demand for a product or service. An advertisement awakens latent demand by bringing attention to the product or service, or strives to create demand by informing us of a need or problem we weren’t yet aware of having.

By advertising in a mix of traditional media (television, radio, cinema, billboards, magazines and newspapers), companies aim to increase their sales. The process is rather hit or miss: a return on investment (ROI) only occurs when a person, sufficiently motivated, passes through a shop’s checkout or orders a service. This ROI is notoriously hard to measure. John Wanamaker summed it up best when he wryly noted,

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As Barack Obama prepares his challenge against John McBush, one of his many challenges is to engage and motivate the many constituencies which supported the Hillary Clinton candidacy.

It is unlikely that the white racist contingent will rally around Obama’s message of hope any time soon; American is not yet Dante’s paradiso on earth, despite what many of my Italian friends would like to think. However women voters who were charged by the thought of a President Hillary Clinton represent an important voting block for Barack.

Choosing Hillary as his vice president would certainly be a significant move to attract and consolidate this block, yet as many have noted, this carries other risks. A credible commitment to actively recruit women to fill cabinet and other high level posts in the Obama administration would probably be a good tatic (and good policy), assuming Barack is able to do so without handing the rabid right a “quota bone” to masticate.

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In theory, this is a marketing blog, focusing on search engine optimization, web analytics and other web marketing topics. So what does Wordpress security have to do with Google and SEO?

Well one downside of the extended web ecosystem is that the same idiots who jump the queue in the supermarket will try to exploit your good blog as a way to jump their way to the top of Google’s search results.

One thing is certain, you won’t be feeling very groovy if you have the misadventure of being de-listed by Google as has happened to several of my fellow blogger friends.

I’m not a Wordpress security expert, and I don’t play one on TV. That said, there are a few Wordpress security best practices worth considering for your Wordpress installation.

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Several months ago a client inspired me to write a comprehensive guide to keeping website content out of search engines. Usually website owners are focused on the opposite side of search engine optimization, insuring web content is well indexed. Yet, as many can attest, search engines can be all too efficient at finding documents they shouldn’t. Thus, the need to understand what options exist, how they work and which search engines support them.

One problem with the techniques available up until now is that options for digital media have been limited. The official way to keep video, audio and pdf files out of search engines was through the robots.txt protocol, not a very efficient tool when setting indexing options on a file level.

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A frequent Search Engine Optimization question is “how do search engines such as Google handle JavaScript and CSS?“

Historically, search engines processed web pages much like an old text video browser such as lynx. A search engine only “saw” what the simplest browser could display – simple html.

Much for this reason, search engine optimization consultants have long advocated that site developers keep site coding simple, avoid hiding navigation systems in JavaScript menus and the like.

Today the situation is more complex. Google and the other search engines will try to extract links from anything they can – from PDF files to JavaScript embedded in a web page. This process is not foolproof, however – a site should still avoid relying solely on a JavaScript based navigation system, especially when CSS is a better choice.

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One of the common problems of writing in a foreign language is that of using the right expressions in the right context. As an example, is the English expression child’s play, a simple task or act, gioco di ragazzi or gioco da ragazzi in Italian?

While linguistic websites will undoubtedly provide the answer, sometimes the most efficient way to get the answer is to tap the knowledge of the masses available in Google or a similar search engine.

In the process of cataloging multiple billions of pages, the major search engines have amassed a fairly good sized data sample of how often an expression is used and usually provide the context of the search phrase in the search engine results snippet or abstract.

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Rare is the web professional who doesn’t know that building a great website isn’t usually enough to guarantee its success. Sites have to be visible in search engines for the keywords and phrases web navigators are most likely to associate with the site’s content. An entire industry has grown up around SEO, search engine optimization. Yawn, you say.

What about the reverse side of the coin, keeping content out of search engines? Should be easy, no? Maybe not. In February, we looked at 5 ways to stop Google and the other search engines from downloading and indexing a website’s pages.

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Expats in Italy need to stay on top of professional and daily happenings locally while still engaging in the wider world. This task is made difficult by the vast quantity and quality of resources available in English (my native language), as exemplified by the BBC. Unfortunately, their Italian equivalents, such as the ad-infested public broadcaster RAI, just can’t compete for my attention.

It doesn’t get much easier on the web marketing front. The primary search engines in Italy are the US based Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live and Ask, sometimes found in their rebranded skins: Arianna (enhanced by Google) and Virgilio (listed by Google as a customer). Inevitably, most of my web marketing reading is English language centric.

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At yesterday’s ZenaCamp in Genova, I gave a presentation on the main issues that are frequently encountered when creating sites for an international audience:

• Language
• Accented Characters and Symbols
• Language Variants
• Culture

A particular focus was made on user issues, such as providing a page in the right language to a site visitor while allowing them to override the choice - and remembering their choice upon successive site visits.

Search engine optimization was also discussed as there are several techniques which can be used to help search engines correctly identify a web page’s language.

If you’d like a copy of the presentation, please contact me.

Gianfranco Chicco captured several happy campers right after lunch!

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