Google’s Blog Bar Enhancement
About a week ago, Google announced the addition of the Blog Bar to its current line up of AJAX powered addons for web sites. Along with the News bar and Video bar, the Blog bar allows a webmaster to identify keywords and publish Google search results for those keywords directly on their site. In this case the results are specifically pulled from the Google Blog Search.
I have added the Google Blog Bar to the homepage here to give a test. See the right hand column towards to bottom. I used 3 key phrases; “SEO”, “Social Media” and “Internet Marketing”. You can select any of these and the search results displayed will update to the current results for the phrase.
The bar has been very popular and is been seen popping up all over the blogosphere. Google is listening to customer feedback and implemented changes already. The first Blog Bar update includes changes to allow a webmaster to select a specific site to be included in the results. The site restricted search “means that you can now create a Blog Bar and program it to only search over a selected blog”.
Many SEOs are steering clear of anything “AJAX” due to its issues with crawl-ability and content accessibility. I happen to be of the camp which understands there are very good uses of AJAX from an SEO standpoint. This happens to be one of them. I think AJAX is a very good tool to “hide” content which may be considered duplicate but is still very useful for your users. This will allow the engines to focus on the unique relevant content of your pages and ignore the cannon fodder which may be spreading rapidly across the Internet. Because this content is in AJAX, I am not a bit worried that it is probably replicated on 50 or 60 other SEO blogs by now.
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Most SEOs are scared of AJAX because anything that smells of programming scares them.
AJAX is a valuable tool for sites that use SEO and aren’t using any spam techniques in the least.
AJAX is valuable not just to “hide content,” but to avoid duplicate content where “no new content is provided.” Showing the same information 5 different ways with straight links (traditional page-heavy SEO approach), possibly giving users a few lines of feedback, is more likely to get duplicate content filters than to help you, so using AJAX to provide those features means you haven’t cluttered up your site with extra URLs for the same content.
That said, most SEOs are nervous of everything Google does, because they collect SO much information. Google Analytics is a very useful application, but I’m terrified that the “Firewall” between them and the search team will break down, and they’ll track related sites through accounts there. You might be so squeaky clean that it doesn’t matter, but it’s scary if you ever run informational sites related to your commercial endeavors.