Two of the most popular Web 2.0 interactive elements, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and Flash, might be great for customers and a fresh experience on many sites, but they are inherently unfriendly to the major search engine spiders. In my article on Search Engine Land entitled, "The Search Engine Unfriendliness Of Web 2.0" I cover AJAX and Flash in detail, to show you how to prevent these new technologies from harming your ability to get the most out of Web 2.0.

Here are a few quotes from the article that might help those of you who employ AJAX and Flash into your blogs or websites. This next quote covers a great tip about Flash:

Google isn't likely to make big improvements on how it crawls, indexes and ranks Flash files anytime soon. So, it's in your hands to either replace those Flash elements with a more accessible alternative like CSS/DHTML or to employ a Web design approach known as "progressive enhancement," whereby designs are layered in a concatenated manner to provide an alternative experience for non-Flash users. This way, all users, including search engine spiders, will be able to access your content and functionality.

In this quote, I talk about progressive enhancement's alternative to work with AJAX:

Here, progressive enhancement renders a non-JavaScript version of the AJAX application for spiders and JavaScript-incapable browsers. A low-tech alternative to progressive enhancement is to place an HTML version of your AJAX application within noscript tags (see TheCleanerMovie.com for an example).

For more tips about how you can incorporate progressive enhancement, feel free to visit my article.

Earlier this summer I had the chance to interview (by phone) Maile Ohye Senior Support Engineer at Google. Maile's role is to support users and webmasters, but also to implement changes in Google's code with feedback from users like you. The podcast of my interview has just gone live this week.

Download it now (6 MB, 25 min)

Maile was forthcoming about Google's "new" (i.e. expanded) Webmaster Guidelines. She explained that, in a lot of cases, webmasters don't necessarily have a good understanding of what SEO is, and don't know when they are doing something that violates their guidelines. Gray/black hat discussions like "cloaking" and "doorway" pages are covered within the new guidelines, which is great for big and small SEO shops, too, that may interpret those terms differently.

Maile and I had a geeky discussion about cloaking, session IDs, Flash, progressive enhancement, noscript, sitemaps, rel=nofollow, and paid links. In the end, Maile reaffirmed Google's desire to put users first.

More highlights on my interview here.