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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In the course of a search engine optimization project, I’m often asked during the competitor analysis phase why one website ranks highly in Alexa, while another ranks highly in an other statistics supplier’s top websites survey.

As our two part article Web statistics for internet market research: pick a number, any number illustrates, there are a plethora of services offering web statistics. Website owners often cite their Alexa rank to demonstrate how much more important their site is compared to a competitor’s. Other website owners will pay for Nielsen//Netratings panel research, a sampling technique born in the 1930s which surveys about 0% of Italy’s adult population – no wonder then the IAB has called this technique outdated.

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Marketing professionals know that brands are worth big money. A brand name and logo serve as an instant shorthand to convey a mental image of a product or service. Companies invest extensively when developing and launching a new brand name. Once launched, brand names are fiercely protected.

Looking for Trenitalia?

It was thus with surprise that I noticed several weeks ago traffic to Trenitalia being redirected to the parent group’s website which carries the old retail name, Ferrovie dello Stato.

Looking for this?

This is what you’ll get.

Stranger yet, timetable queries made from the Ferrovie dello Stato home page produced results using the orario.trenitalia.com subdomain with the Trenitalia name and graphics. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the redirect was accomplished with a simple client side meta refresh tag – rather than the preferred server side method to set a permanent 301 or temporary 302 http redirect status.

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