Renew Your Domain Names
There isn’t much chance that your institution will stop using its .edu domain name, but sometimes we register special domains for a marketing campaign, admissions push or other purpose.
Often, after a campaign has completed, or your marketing materials move on to the next theme and message, those old domains are left lying around, often with residual value, search engine wise and brand recognition wise. Even though you might not be using them, it’s worth the $8 or whatever the cost is at a registrar like GoDaddy to keep them. Here’s an example.
A local cultural institution had used the same web address for years. Pretty much every tourism, educational, news and entertainment site linked to them, including my college. A year or two ago, their new marketing materials pointed people to a new domain, but they were smart and left the old one in place for all the legacy links floating around the interwebs.
Then they did the unthinkable. They didn’t renew that old domain. And guess what? It was grabbed up by someone else. I’ll give you a wild guess what kind of site grabbed it?
Yep. Porn.
On paper, it’s smart. That link has a ton of Google juice from sites with a lot authority in the eyes of Google - colleges, universities, newspapers and so on. It’s got instant page rank and existing search placements, especialy for terms like the institutions name.
In reality, it’s a pain because now I’ve got to go through and find all the links, and of course, many are on pages I don’t have access to. I’m not alone either - lots of other sites have to now go through their sites and make fixes.
The moral of the story - even if you are done with a domain name and a marketing push, renew that domain name. It’s cheap to do, is good for your institution, and saves your fellow web developers a bit of work.
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Adobe Announces Flash will be Crawlable
One format that was never search engine friendly has been the Flash (SWF) format. It’s been a big closed, unfriendly box to search robots, until now. Adobe has announced they’ve given info to the big search engines about how to crawl Flash files.
The press release says:
The openly published SWF specification describes the file format used to deliver rich applications and interactive content via Adobe Flash Player, which is installed on more than 98 percent of Internet-connected computers. Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.
So, soon Google and others will index Flash files. Is that good or bad? I’m not sure.
For a lot of reasons, chief among them accessibility, I’ve tried to limit my uses of Flash to a minimum, but it’s become the de facto method for delivering video content. For search crawlers, these SWF files will be tricky because they usually call in a separate FLV video file. For the best SEO, you’ll want to robots to crawl your video description. Kyle has some good SEO tips.
Hopefully, this will not entice higher ed developers to use Flash more and more, especially for things like navigation, since it will be crawled. Badly designed and managed Flash is just as harmful as badly designed HTML.
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Where the magic happens: part trois
More desk action today - this time from Karine Joly, of CollegeWebEditor.com, HigherEdExperts.com and writer for University Business magazine.
I’ve worked with Karine a few times for HigherEdExperts.com which was educational and fun. She’s also interviewed me a several times for her UB columns, which are always topical and informative. I’m looking forward to her keynote at EduWeb in July.
Karine has added notes to the photo, click on the picture to see them.
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