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UPDATE: Editors’ Note: At the request of Google, we’ve removed the photo of Google engineer Jayant Madhavan, co-author (with Alon Halevy) of the Google Webmaster Central blog post, Crawling through HTML forms, posted by Maile Ohye, Senior Support Engineer at Google. The photo was deleted at Google’s request to respect the privacy of Google’s corporate data and the personal privacy of Jayant Madhavan.
– Kevin Heisler, Executive Editor, Search Engine Watch

A few hours ago, Google announced to the world that the company has been crawling forms on “high-quality” Web sites to index “Invisible Web” content in the Google.com search engine.

Google’s intention (as always) aims to improve the quality of search results for users of Google’s search engine.

Crawling Web site forms, though, constitutes a sea change in terms of data privacy; specifically, the privacy of corporate data.

“In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn’t find and index for users who search on Google,” according to Jayant Madhavan and Alon Halevy, from the Crawling and Indexing Team on an official Google blog.

Here’s how Googlebot does it, according to Google engineers:

Last year, as the search marketing analyst for JupiterResearch, I said that the biggest issue in 2007 would be the threat to the privacy of corporate data.

I was wrong, 2008 is the year corporate IT departments worldwide will be forced to spend time, money and resources to ensure that search engine spiders do not inadvertently index data a company would prefer to be private.

The same holds true for non-profit organizations and other institutions.

From a personal standpoint, I have confidence in Google’s data security systems, despite the recent departure of Google CIO, Doug Merrill.

I have full confidence that Google practices “good Internet citizenship.”

I’m confident Google has paved the road to relevance with good intentions.

This is not simply a “pioneering move” by Google.

That the robotic filling-in of forms has already been practiced by AOL’s Quigo, according to SearchEngineLand, does not reassure me.

I’m sorry, Sergey, Larry, Eric. I can’t in good conscience defend Google’s decision to our readers. The costs to CEOs, CIOs and CTOs at corporations far outweigh the benefits to consumers.

Please, reconsider.

Do not make the robotic querying of Web site forms the default spidering practice for Google. As a search engine, Google has become the gateway to the Internet and with great power comes great responsibility.

End this experiment now.

Stop this experiment before the backlash against Google develops. It’s not a question you want to answer when Wall St. analysts quiz you on the company’s performance on April 17th during the First Quarter earnings conference call.

PDFs are particularly significant in B2B marketing, which makes optimizing them for the web is an important piece of SEO strategy in that sector. Thankfully, Galen de Young of Francis Marketing has a new post on optimizing PDFs on their B2B marketing blog.

Here are the key take away points from Galen’s post:

Other quick tips include:

PDFs can be forgotten when developing or redesigning a web site and lost in a greater SEM strategy. But when properly optimized they can be a powerful content tool for your business.

Related Reading:
Yahoo to Distribute Contextual Ads on PDFs
Yahoo Adds Support for Page-Level Exclusion Tags for Non-HTML Docs
Search Marketing Works for B2B, Too
Vertical Search: B2B Survey Says … Blazing Hot

Yahoo, MySpace and Google have pledged their support to open standards for social media development and data by joining together to form the OpenSocial Foundation. The group will ensure that OpenSocial continues as an open, community-governed specification.

OpenSocial is a specification, launched by Google last year, that defines a common API for social applications across multiple Web sites. It has implications for search marketers and application developers, since it will speed up the development of cross-platform applications. It could also force the hand of non-members, such as Microsoft and Facebook.

Using JavaScript and HTML, developers can create applications with OpenSocial that access features in a social network, like friends and update feeds. By using a common API, developers can build one application that will work across multiple social platforms, extending the reach of their applications and making it easier to add more functionality for users.

The formation of the foundation is not entirely altruistic. By uniting the interests of three of the largest Web entities, the group will have a strong voice in the development of future standards and specifications.

According to Yahoo, “The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.”

Lately prospective clients have been coming around with extremely colorful and eerily similar Google PPC disaster stories. Cost are skyrocketing, conversions are plummeting, and attaining decent paid rankings is difficult or impossible. This threatens the viability of PPC itself as a marketing strategy.

At least a dozen potential PPC client-portfolios have meandered across my desk this month with these exact symptoms, usually with a precipitous decline over the last 6-8 months.

There’s a shortage of qualified PPC professionals out there in the streets, so it might take a little time to find a vendor who’s a great fit for your firm. The purpose of this post is to provide immediate tactics for in-house marketers running PPC, to stem the downward spiral immediately.

There are many excellent authors writing about PPC tactics and techniques. Next week, Search Engine Strategies NYC has quite a few sessions which are well worth the investment.  Much has changed in the paid search world over the last year, rendering many (or most) set-it-and-forget-it PPC campaigns neutered. Here’s a 15 minute checklist of Emergency action items which will likely impact your bottom line immediately to help right the ship.

1   Check the landing page SEO. I know, that sounds counter-intuitive. SEO is only about organic search right? This is not so anymore. Whereas “bid” used to equal any given ad’s position on the paid SERPS, now the ever-imposing “Quality Score” (Q-Score) + “bid” equals position. Q-Score at it’s most basic level is Google’s algorithmic assessment of the relevancy-relationship between your keywords, ad copy and landing page. The Q-Score impacts the cost of placing your ads higher on the paid SERPS.

Go back to your SEO roots on the landing page. Check the landing page copy, which is more commonly associated with organic optimization. These days the landing page portion, of what are several Q-scores, is less stringent (Google decides yes/no on relevancy). Make PPC landing pages directly correlate to the AdGroup’s keywords and ad copy.  An excellent approach is to optimize the landing pages for keywords in the referring AdGroup with the highest Click-through Ratio (CTR).

Certainly include the ad copy and the most important keywords from the AdGroup on the landing page. It’s even a great choice to put the Ad headline in the landing page’s HTML Title Tag. If it’s emergency-time and PPC is tanking, take the approach that multiple AdGroups require multiple landing pages. Even if the algorithm does need read a particular SEO attribute, results could be affected as pertain to human behavior if not Q-Score. Finally, be advised that Google has recently announced that PPC landing page load times will soon affect the Q-Score.

2   Tighten up the relationships between AdGroups and the keywords within. One way to immediately move the needle is by segmenting the AdGroups to where every keyword is in the ad copy itself.  For instance, say the AdGroup is “Coupons” and contain keyword permutations of “Printable Coupons,” “Downloadable Coupons,” and “Food Coupons.” Create separate AdGroups to house each set of permutations.  To clarify now we’re talking about the “Printable Coupons,” “Downloadable Coupons,” and “Food Coupons” AdGroups. It then becomes easy to craft ad copy which literally contains every keyword in the group.

Combine the technique of hyper-focused AdGroups with landing page optimization and there lies the makings of a significantly improved Q-Score. This will lower costs, help attain higher ad placement on the paid SERPs, and increase CTR. It may just stem the decline in itself. Also users are more likely to convert, since the landing page is tightly focused to the incoming keyword query.

Another added benefit to this thinking is potential organic prominence for your PPC landing pages, provided there is a link-path from the homepage drilling into the PPC landing page. Landing pages can be placed at any level on the site. It’s not uncommon for PPC landing pages to be “makers” organically on the heels of this approach.

Google’s never ending quest to improve the relevancy of paid SERPs has led us all to work harder to improve Q-Score. In light of declining PPC effectiveness, take these steps to set things straight. As with all-things-SEM, there are basic best practices to undertake as first steps in every case. In Pay per Click, focusing landing page SEO and AdGroup segmentation should be the first emergency actions undertaken in set up or as effectiveness of an existing campaign plummets.

As part of its move toward a more open search platform, Yahoo announced today that it will begin supporting microformats and other semantic Web standards. Site owners can markup pages with microformats like hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom and XFN to the HTML code on a page, or create structured feeds using RDF.

By implementing these open standards, site owners can classify certain elements on the page as contact information, events, reviews, episodic content, etc. Yahoo can take the structured content and more easily incorporate it into their index.

Sites like LinkedIn are already using microformats, but there is currently no incentive for site owners to do so, according to Amit Kumar, director of product management for Yahoo Search.

“The data is already there, we just need to give people a reason to identify it. Content owners want to expose their structured data, but so far there’s been no killer consumer application giving them a reason to do it. Search can be that killer app,” Kumar said.

By marking up a page with microformats, Yahoo can better index the content and its relationship to other parts of the site. Yahoo will then be able to surface that content in more relevant ways, such as with the upcoming “Search Monkey” platform that will allow site owners to build plug-ins for Yahoo Search that will enhance the site owner’s listing in Yahoo’s search results.

Search Monkey will be the first use of structured data by Yahoo, but they could potentially be used to affect other parts of the search results or ranking algorithms in the future, according to Kumar. Yahoo will provide more details at an upcoming developer conference it’s planning in the coming weeks.

Bill Slawski is reporting that Yahoo is joining the ranks of MSN and Google in an attempt to incorporate page layout into its web search algorithm. A new patent filed by the search engine examines how to estimate page elements without rendering the web page the way a browser does. As a result, the process for indexing a page could become faster.

The process involves creating object trees based on structural elements contained within the HTML code of a given web page. The goal is to give more weight to the unique content of a page versus the site-wide static content.

In other words, Yahoo wants to pay less attention to sidebars, headers, footers and other elements that are on every page of a site, and focus on the element that is exclusive to a single page. As a result, the links and content within the unique element will be given more weight compared to the static elements.

Slawski concludes that if you develop your own sites, then looking in-depth at the patent may be worth your while:

Bill Slawski is reporting that Yahoo is joining the ranks of MSN and Google in an attempt to incorporate page layout into its web search algorithm. A new patent filed by the search engine examines how to estimate page elements without rendering the web page the way a browser does. As a result, the process for indexing a page could become faster.

The process involves creating object trees based on structural elements contained within the HTML code of a given web page. The goal is to give more weight to the unique content of a page versus the site-wide static content.

In other words, Yahoo wants to pay less attention to sidebars, headers, footers and other elements that are on every page of a site, and focus on the element that is exclusive to a single page. As a result, the links and content within the unique element will be given more weight compared to the static elements.

Slawski concludes that if you develop your own sites, then looking in-depth at the patent may be worth your while:

Still looking for some attention from the social networks? Facebook delivered a new client library on Friday afternoon, which makes your widgets easier to launch in their ecosystem. While this library isn’t exactly the second coming, it’s welcome news.
According to Facebook developer Wei Zu, “This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook [...]

Still looking for some attention from the social networks? Facebook delivered a new client library on Friday afternoon, which makes your widgets easier to launch in their ecosystem. While this library isn’t exactly the second coming, it’s welcome news.

According to Facebook developer Wei Zu, “This JavaScript client library allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML.â€

Facebook also encourages developers to install applications outside its domain, which I understand was possible (if more difficult) before this release anyway. Blogger Nick O’Neill is ebullient about the social connections to be made across the web, if you place these applications on your site.

My reaction is just more measured, that’s all. When someone arrives on your site, they can connect with others only if they are signed into Facebook. Will you attract people or turn them off? This entirely depends on your business and whether joining up is an important attribute right now.

Here’s a gameplan for your Facebook interactions. Since the widget hurdle has been virtually dropped, it’s worth thinking about what kind of traffic (or links) you might get from Facebook overall. Like any social network, it’s not under your control — but you should try to become more available and present there. Consider the following approaches for engagement.

Click to read the rest of this post…

Search engine optimization for small business starts with a title tag. In today’s Little Biz column, “HTML Title Tag Defines Your SEO Strategy,” Carrie Hill explains that crafting the perfect title tag is a lot of art, and a little bit of science. She looks at three types of page titles to see what works [...]