Someone once suggested we should be paying more attention to Amit Singhal instead of always listening to Matt Cutts. Google just published a statement from a “Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google” named Amit Singhal. Last June, Singhal said that Google made about a half-dozen adjustments to Google’s ranking algorithm every week. Now the count is up to just shy of a dozen per week, but those Google engineers have a handle on it:

We make about ten ranking changes every week and simplicity is a big consideration in launching every change. Our engineers understand exactly why a page was ranked the way it was for a given query. This simple understandable system has allowed us innovate quickly, and it shows. The “keep it simple” philosophy has served us well.

So Google’s engineers can look at a SERP and they know why each page ranks where it does? Amazing. Given all of the factors, and all of the data one would need to consider to make such a determination, these guys at Google are simply that good? Remarkable.

Sorry but I don’t buy it. There are many obvious cases, and cases where select factors have overriding influence, but in most cases, in order to know why a given page ranks where it does, you must do some very careful review of evidence (content, structure, back links, history) no matter who you are. Yes they probably have great tools, but no, they don’t know why any given page ranks where it does.

You can determine for yourself if the following statement is a lie, deceptive, or just evasive via “tricky” language:

No discussion of Google’s ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! :) - question: “Does Google manually edit its results?” Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us.

Hubris and humility matter a great deal in this world. Until I learn of ex-Google engineers rockin’ the SEO world with their magical powers, I’ll maintain my cautious skepticism of the value of  Singhal’s communications.

Mobile ads work. Bottom line: mobile ads represent the cut-to-the-chase of browser-view advertising. When I surf on my mobile I am typically at most most “in a hurry” ever. I am at my least patient, and most willing to click on an ad if I believe that ad will lead me to the promised land.
Take any aspect of current online advertising, and extrapolate it to the state-of-the-art edge of performance, and you have the current/pending opportunity for mobile ads:

• I have no patience for graphic bloat: show me a big graphic on my mobile and I surf away before it can load completely. Not only don’t I have the time to wait, but I get annoyed that some designer thought it prudent to attempt to load al that bloat onto my device. Do that on a page said to be specific to mobile devices, and I’ll never come back.I’m all for you guys creating a research lab to solve the “how to serve rich media to mobile devices” but don’t run your tests on my device. Ever.

• text link ads work: short, to-the-point contextual ad links are efficient and confidence building. they help me find what I need fast.

• targeted is best: If I am surfing the Enduro page of the BMW motorcycle website on my HTC Kaiser phone, I’m not interested in ringtones for a Motorola phone. Even if I am surfing WasteSomeTimeNow.com, I am still not interested in ringtones, okay? Targeted ads are best on the wbe, but targeted ads may be the only acceptable ads for the mobile web. And if you don’t know what targeted means, hire a statistician and run tests to figure it out. The chances of me experiencing your test should be very, very small, ok? With good design, you shouldn’t have those worries.

• shortest path to endpoint is best: if you know I am interested in a local Thai restaurant, give me the phone number in the ad. Make it clickable if you need to count your conversion, but the click should help me on my way cause you should know that all I want to do is call for a reservation or check availability or get directions…. answer that… that’s your job. Get paid by the restaurant. Yeah… paid inclusion. We’re not talking about Google search engine, we’re talking mobile. Do whatever it takes to drive customers… show me testimonials, show me what Zagat says, show me the specials…. convert me. And get paid.

I think what I am saying is, this mobile web thing is commercial opportunity first, likely followed by free unlimited surfing of the World Wild Web someday, but not necessarily for the masses. It could be TheCommercialWeb. Done well the Yellow Pages could be all I need on my mobile device. If the MobileYellowPages got to the 80% mark, where they did 80% of the job well, I’d accept that I had to pay more to surf the www. Think AOL… but this time, it could work. Lock me in, put everthing you already know about effective win-win advertising to work on a closed-comunity mobile device browser, and make money. Now.

Wait much longer, and everyone and his brother will expect to be able to surf the open web at desktop speeds, on a 3 inch browser, and if they see ads in the way they will complain. I call that LiveSearchMobile Yahoo GO! a missed opportunity.

Whenever I interview or otherwise evaluate an SEO, I eventually find my way to The Flash SEO Question: Name 3 ways to SEO a flash-heavy web site for Google/Yahoo!/MSN, not including “make an HTML version”. I consider it a Fermi question for Competitive Webmasters.

Now Google has formally announced it is indexing the contents of Flash web sites. The Official Google blog announced it as an academic achievement (Google learns to crawl Flash). The Google Webmaster blog practically denies ever having been unable to properly handle flash, with it’s version Improved Flash Indexing. Adobe attempts to take credit with “Adobe Advances Rich Media Search on the Web“, even though it seems to admit what it seems to have always vehemently denied in the past - that Flash websites were failures because people couldn’t find them.

The accurate reality? Google has been struggling to understand Flash for years, has read and indexed the readable text portion of Flash files for quite some time. Last year Google started exploring Adobe’s Flash SDK for better understanding of the meaning of Flash content. Good SEO consultants have devised ways of helping Google understand Flash web pages for years as well, using various techniques beyond the obvious “create an accessible version for search engines”. Some of those methods work very well. Others are risky, because they permit Google to classify them and whenever Google classifies something, it suffers in the risk/reward department.

So why does this “news” scare me as an SEO consultant? A few reasons:

Google says it will not find nor index Flash that is loaded by “certain” javascript which it does not read nor follow. This statement maybe a lead in for future /enhanced discrimination against js loaders, which have already received a fair share of PR attention since they are effective at cloaking Flash content and thus are ripe for abuse by unscrupulous competitive web publishers. It is true that one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch, but it is also true that Google highly prefers algorithmic approaches to content censorship over anything more cognitively challenging. Hence they are all too often happy to pass on bunches of perfectly good apples in order to avoid one bad one or even the risk of a bad one. I’d love to debate the importance of naturally ocurring acetylsalysilic acid with Google’s engineers, but I doubt they have the patience for my analogy. The truth is that we use js loaders because they are a reliable means of loading Flash in all browsers, under webmaster-controlled conditions. Google’s statement that it “might” not folow “certain” js is all a gray cloud of uncertainty. We can’t trust Google if we don’t know what it is doing. We shouldn’t let Google dictate web technologies to protect Google unilaterally. Let’s not let that fact get lost in the F.U.D. of SEO vs. Google.

Google Gospel Spreads Fast in Web Land. I can already hear the gears of misinformation turning as designers and even so-called SEOs prepare to tell clients “Flash is okay now, Google indexes it“. Truth is Google is trying to understand it, which is more important than indexing. This brings a new frontier to SEO for Flash; a frontier of research that has very little to do with indexing of the content within existing Flash files or the content in Flash files built the traditional way.

SEO for Flash just got more expensive, because it got more sophisticated. Flash websites have always been expensive because they look good and work poorly. Clients of Flash web sites think the site is all included - looks good and self contained within the Flash. But for web sites that demand a search presence for marketing purposes, the up-front cost of a Flash web site is a small fraction of the total cost of making a Flash website perform as intended on the web. Flash-based navigation has never worked well, unless heavily supported by program logic. Where SEO for Flash used to be limited to a reasonable set of success metrics, we now have an opportunity to help Google much more as it seeks to understand what the Flash content means for the user. Flash now plays an important semantic role, where it used to be ancillary. The first thing smart SEOs need to do now is block Google from indexing Flash, simply because we don’t control Google’s interpretation of the meaning of Flash content. I don’t think that is what Adobe intended.

It is early yet, but someday Google will understand a Flash-based mortgage calculator is just that… and grant it relevance accordingly. Until then, SEO for Flash is once again a competitive arena in need of research and SEO attention. Until that hard work has been done, I’m sending Flash back down to the minors for basic training and evaluation. If you have your own, add them in the comments. I’d love to hear your meaningful thoughts on the subject.