First, check out my post on Search Engine Land on Google’s new ability to execute JavaScript onClick events and the continuing searchability issues with technologies such as AJAX and Flesh.

This afternoon (June 3rd) at the close of SMX Advanced in Seattle, Jane and Robot and Adobe/Global Strategies are hosting an after-hours meetup so SMX attendees can ask any questions that came up over the course of the conference. The meetup is open to anyone! You don’t need an SMX pass to attend, so if you’re in Seattle and have technical SEO questions, come on down! It’s in the Sound Conference room at Bell Harbor from 4:30 to 6:30pm. We’ll have the usual drinks and snacks and networking time as well!

Then on June 12th in San Francisco, Jane and Robot and Microsoft are hosting a Search Developer Summit. If you’re a web developer, this is a great opportunity to hear directly from other devs who have been there, as well as search engine reps, on best practices for building sites that can be easily found by search engines. there will be lots of case studies, discussion time, and Q&A with the experts. And both lunch and afternoon drinks and snacks are included for the amazingly low price of $49! (For a limited time! Act now! Representatives are standing by!). But seriously, space is limited to register now before we’re sold out.

And if you’re at SMX Advanced today, come by the SEO audit session or the mega session and say hi!

SMX Advanced, the always-awesome advanced search marketing conference, is coming up in Seattle on June 2nd and 3rd. Last year, I programmed a developer day that brought developers and search marketers together around technical SEO issues. We continued the dive into web infrastructure issues at SMX West in February. This year, SMX Advanced features great advanced online marketing content and an all-new In House SEM Exchange, and some of you asked if this year included content for developers, since we aren’t doing a separate developer day.

I’m happy to report that we’ve just added a developer-focused session and events and have put together a recommend itinerary of the agenda to provide developers with a list of the sessions that will interest them the most.

So if you’re:

• a developer who wants to add to your marketable skill set and learn more about building search-friendly web sites
• an engineering entrepreneur who wants to make sure you are building your web application so that potential customers can easily find you for free
• A developer in a large organization who wants to build search-friendly code into the development process
• A search marketer who works closely with developers

Then you don’t want to miss this special itinerary at SMX Advanced. If you’re a search marketer planning to attend the conference, bring along your developers and come away from the conference with a shared understanding of how best to work together to build SEO into the entire marketing and development process.

I’m a developer? Why do I need to know about SEO? Isn’t that for marketing?

Search is the primary navigation method on the web, so if your site can’t be easily found in search engines, you’re losing substantial customer acquisition opportunities. A key element in being found in search engines is the site’s technical architecture. If you are a web developer, the ability to create search-friendly technical architecture is a valuable skillset. If you are launching a web startup, you want to attract as many customers as possible, and being easily found in search is a great way to do that for free.

What can I expect as a developer attending SMX Advanced?

The developer itinerary outlined below can give you the foundation you need to ensure your site’s technical implementation improves rather than hinders the ablity of potential customers to find you from searching.

We’ve added a special session and Q&A time just for developers, as well as provided a suggested path through the agenda with sessions that focus on technical implementation, diagnosing issues, and overall site architecture for optimal search engine crawling and indexing.

Remember, you’re free to attend any session you’d like and havefull access to all sessions and networking events. But the recommended path for developers is:

Day 1:

Jane and Robot Presents SEO Overview for Developers
This special session is intended to give developers an overview of how search engines work and the important element to consider for search engine optimization (SEO) when building web infrastructure. This introduction will set the stage for later sessions that will dive into the details of each technical element.

Learn about how search engines work, including discovery, crawling, extraction, indexing, ranking, and display. Find out about the most important technical elements for effective search acquisition. Topics include developing a crawlable infrastructure, building rich internet applications, URL rewriting, redirection, and canonicalization.

See examples of how things can be done well and how things can go really, really wrong. Topics include building search-friendly search architecture, including  URL structure, rich media (such as Flash, video, AJAX), and managing bots.

Duplicate Content Solutions and the Canonical Tag
Many site infrastructure scenarios introduce duplicate content, which can hinder effective search engine crawling, indexing, and ranking. The search engines can’t efficiently crawl the site, which can lead to less of the site being indexed, and links pointing to multiple versionis of content can cause PageRank dilution, which can lead to lowered rankings.

Tracking codes on URLs, parameters for sort orders, separate pages for very similar items (such as identical products in different colors), and page revision history (such as a wiki-style site that provides access to earlier versions of pages) can all cause these duplicate content issues.

Recently, the search engines introduced a new tool to help combat duplicate content issues: the canonical tag. This session looks and how the tag has been performing for some webmasters plus revisits other duplicate content tools and techniques.

SEO Ranking Factors in 2009
How much does that H1 tag really matter, versus the number of links pointing at a domain? Do “authority” sites always have an advantage over other sites with less reputation. Is brand recognition now a bigger issue? This session looks at on-the-page and off-the-page factors that influence web search, to understand what remains useful and what new signals are growing in importance.

Is Your Hosting Ready For Social Media Success?
Congratulations! You just made it to the home page of Digg. And seconds later, your server crashed, taking with it the chance for all those eyeballs to see your content. In this session, a look at how to ensure that your hosting provider and content management systems are ready for what social media might send, when something goes viral.

You&A With Matt Cutts
What’s a You&A? That’s where you, the audience, put your questions directly to the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts. As an engineer in search quality, Matt’s been dealing with webmaster issues for Google since 2000 and is well known to many advanced search marketers from his blog and public speaking.

Day 2:

Keynote Q&A: Dr. Qi Lu, President, Online Services Division, Microsoft
Dr. Qi Lu took the helm of Microsoft’s search efforts in January. Now six months into his new role, during this keynote Q&A with Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan, Lu shares in this some of the changes that have been made to Microsoft Live Search and where the company intends to head in the search space.

Conducting an SEO Audit to Troubleshoot Problems and Tune-Up Performance
Has something gone wrong with your organic search engine traffic? An SEO audit might be in order. This session covers how to conduct an efficient audit that troubleshoots real problems, rather than taking you down blind alleys. It also helps you reassess your current SEO efforts for areas that can be tweaked and improved.

Flash and Search
Flash content has historically been problematic for search engines to index, although it’s been nearly a year since Google & Yahoo gained more support to index Flash content. This session takes a close look at how that’s playing out in real life. Can you just leave it to the crawlers to understand Flash now? Do you still need to consider alternatives to help them? Get up to speed on the current state of how search engines interact with Flash.

Mega Session: SEO Vets Take All Comers
This PowerPoint-free panel is made up of veteran search engine optimization experts taking questions on SEO issues. Put your biggest challenges to them and come away with solutions.

Jane and Robot Presents After-Hours Technical Q&A with the Experts
After two days of tech sessions, get answers to all of your technical questions from our panel of experts. Stay tuned for more details!

Networking and Topic Tables

In addition to all of this great content, you’ll have access to all networking events and topic-focused lunch tables on both days. We’ll have industry leaders in search and development leading discussions and Q&A during lunch for additional opportunities to get your technical search questions answered.

Use discount code jr@SMX for 10% off registration.

We’ll be meeting from 7-10pm and you can sign up at upcoming. Hope to see you there!

And if you’re out at eMetrics in San Jose, come out to my search session on Thursday morning!

two keys are:

• Assessing who the audience is and what they’re searching for
• Ensuring the site architecture is easily crawlable

Read more on O’Reilly Radar

While I was working on that post today, I checked out the new section of whitehouse.gov called “Open for Questions“. Since this is a brand new feature and has been talked up quite a bit online, I thought it would be a good study on government efforts do in search.

The trouble with Google Moderator

Open for Questions uses Google Moderator, which as I’ve previously posted, is a black hole for search engines. That’s unfortunate, since people who are searching for information on health care reform, financial stability, or the environment would likely benefit from finding a lively discussion on whitehouse.gov with concerns from fellow citizens. Another of Google Moderator’s drawbacks is that it doesn’t provide a unique URL for each topic, so for instance, if I wanted to email a link to the discussion about retirement security to my mom or post a link to the education discussion on Facebook, I couldn’t. The best I could do is tell people to go to http://www.whitehouse.gov/OpenForQuestions/ and then scroll to the topic and click on it. If I wanted to share a specific question from one of those topics? Not a chance.

The semantic structure of the page

I then noticed that the title tag of the page uses the text “Open For Questions” with no additional clue that this page is part of whitehouse.gov or that these questions are intended to be from citizens to the White House. That’s not great for either search ranking or search acquisition. If searchers see a listing in the search results for “Open For Questions”, it could mean anything. (Much of whitehouse.gov has title tag issues.)

The heading on the page is “Your Questions on the Economy”. That’s kind of confusing, since you can use the topic navigation to ask questions about all kinds of things. And the heading is in a span class, not an H1, so it doesn’t signal clearly to search engines that this is what the page is about. The text mentions “Thursday”, but no date, which makes me wonder if these discussions will no longer be online after tomorrow. If they are, having the date on the page from the start would make the page a lot easier to maintain later.

Of course, since all of the text is pulled in from Google Moderator via JavaScript, the search engines (and possibly those on mobile devices, screen readers, and older browsers) can’t access any of it anyway. Instead any of those users see this: “Google Moderator is a tool that allows distributed communities to submit and vote on questions for talks, presentations, and events. You must have JavaScript enabled in order to use this feature.”

The real problem: indexability

But as it turns out, all of those obstacles are inconsquential. A search for [white house open for questions] brings up lots of pages that reference the feature, but not the http://www.whitehouse.gov/OpenForQuestions/ page itself.

White House Open For Questions

I was initially surprised because even though much of the content on the page is inaccessible to search engines, the pages has lots of links with descriptive anchor text. And then I realized this isn’t a ranking problem, it’s an indexing problem.

White House Open For Questions, Not Indexing

Surely the search engines have seen the page by now. I checked robots.txt but didn’t see anything blocking it. And then I looked at the source code. There it was.

<meta content=”noindex,nofollow“ name=”robots“/>

They didn’t follow the first rule of indexing.

My guess is that blocking search engines is either accidental (which happens all the time when pages are first launched, since they are often blocked during the development phase) or this page is intended to be only temporary, meant to gather questions for a short period of time, but not keep them as an archive later. I hope the latter isn’t the case, because I think having a repository of the questions Americans care about most can be very useful for a number of reasons.

How can this be fixed?

It may be difficult to fix the issues with indexing Google Moderator content (and that’s really something I wish Google itself would address), but it should be fairly simple to expose the “Open for Questions” landing page to search engines. Just remove the meta robots tag, make the title a bit more descriptive (”Open For Questions: Ask the White House About Your Concerns”), and add a paragraph of text that’s outside of JavaScript that describes what the feature is about. And in the short term, perhaps the content could be exported to an HTML file once questions are closed so they could be searched over later.

Check O’Reilly Radar tomorrow for more tips on how the government can make its content more findable.

The most important feature government web sites can add isn’t really feature at all. But it would absolutely transform the relationship between citizens and government and make an amazing array of public data available. What’s this magic feature?

Make government web sites search engine friendly.

Read more on O’Reilly Radar

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Watch the video

Today, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (links are to their separate announcements) have united to offer a way to reduce duplicate content clutter and make things easier for everyone. Webmasters rejoice! Worried about duplicate content on your site? Want to know what “canonical” means? Read on for more details.

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