Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

If you haven’t seen the official posts, Adobe has been working to make Flash more index-able by search engines. Google has recently rolled out better code for Flash, e.g. you’re now more likely to see useful snippets on Flash pages in Google’s search results.

I’m a fan of this change, and I’m a fan of Adobe in general. They get a lot of credit in my book for opening up the specifications for PostScript, Adobe’s font standards, and their Acrobat/PDF format. Very few companies have been able to open up their specs and still compete successfully against powerful opponents. I respect Adobe for that — not to mention providing one of the first widely-known “plug-in” mechanisms (in Photoshop). The idea of a plugin or extension has greatly affected how people view software from Firefox to WordPress. I’m glad that this most recent change by Adobe will make it easier for search engines to index content in Flash files.

Jefferson Graham didn’t just write an article of free SEO tips — he also brought his video camera along. The result is a five minute video interview with more easy, free search engine optimization tips. Again, this is targeted at beginner SEO and small business SEO instead of advanced marketers. You can watch the video below:

Fun trivia: This video was taped in the lobby of building 43 on the Googleplex campus. Also, I made sure to wear my “We ♥ webmasters” shirt from our webmaster portal team up in Kirkland.

This sucks. On some very rare occasions, when I connect an SD card reader to my Ubuntu machine, it freezes. Normally I just reboot and everything is fine. But this time my Ubuntu machine won’t boot, and it shows a message like

Starting up …
Loading, please wait…
kinit: name_to_dev_t(/dev/disk/by-uuid/bd656dcd-04b4-412f-a880-62a6553bd8b) = sda5(8,5)
kinit: trying to resume from /dev/disk/by-uuid/bd656dcd-04b4-412f-a880-62a6553bd8b
kinit: No resume image, doing normal boot…

Then it hangs forever. Any Ubuntu/Linux gurus have suggestions on how to repair my system so it will boot?

Update: I think the machine is fixed now. Thanks to Sérgio Carvalho and Chris Fleming for the suggestions. It looks like somehow my swap partition got messed up, which affected things when my Linux machine got confused about whether my machine had hibernated. The fix was:

- When the machine boots up, press ‘Esc’ to get to the Grub menu
- Select one of the “recovery mode” options. This will boot you up to a single-user root prompt.
- Run “sudo fdisk /dev/sda” (this assumes that your hard drive is at sda)
- Type “p” to see which hard drive partition is labeled “Linux swap”. In my case the partition was /dev/sda5. Type “q” to exist fdisk.
- Type these commands:

sudo swapoff /dev/sda5
(Use whatever partition was labeled as “Linux swap” in fdisk. For me, this was /dev/sda5)
sudo mkswap /dev/sda5
sudo update-initramfs -u

These commands say “Stop using /dev/sda5 as a swap partition,” then mkswap tells your computer to set up /dev/sda5 as a new/fresh swap partition. Finally, update-initramfs with the -u (update) option will generate an initramfs image. The initramfs image is a gzipped blob of data that the Linux kernel unzips into RAM and then mounts to use as an initial file system.
- Type “reboot” and cross your fingers for your machine to boot up. For me, it rebooted just fine and started working normally.

Thanks to everyone who chimed in with an opinion on this.

(In the webmaster chat last week, someone asked about my cats, so I thought I’d throw out a cat post.)

A little while ago someone mentioned the Kitt-In Box. It’s like an inbox for your desk, except that it holds cats. My cat Emmy likes to hang out in box-like objects, e.g.

So I decided to try this Kit-InBox thingie. Lo and behold, she loves it! Here she is giving it a good workout:

Now I get to type without Emmy perching on me as much, and she gets to stay nearby. Every cat is different, but if your cat likes small spaces and boxes too, I’d say to give the kitty inbox a try.

Jefferson Graham of USA Today stopped by the Googleplex a little while ago and we talked about SEO tips for business owners that want to run their business, not live and breathe search 24 hours a day. The result is an article of search engine optimization (SEO) advice that you could hand to any friend that runs a mom/pop business who wants learn a little more about SEO. Experts won’t be surprised, but Graham’s article covers the basics for a general audience very well.