Bots and crawlers are not "human beings" yet.

[kgun]

1. Background.

Nearly daily, on foreign and Norwegian Tv wee see robots that become more and more human in their actions. Yesterday I saw robots "playing soccer", fairly impressive. We have been told to write for humans and develop websites for humans. It is told that those sites are search engine friendly. But with new flash, client scripting and XML technologies, crawlers and Bots may have problems when they scan a site for content.

2. How a Bot sees a site.

If you put a URL that point to a text document in this

Search Engine Spider Simulator

tool, you will get an idea of how a bot crawls a site. You get additional information if you use the lynx or opera (View + Style + ...) browser.

3. Problems with mobile and 3D web developement.

It is self evident that a crawler will get problems with crawling animated flash sites and some sites devloped for mobile devices. One SEO rule is to have a good title and description tag and text content at the top of the page. Opera's Small-Screen Renderingâ„¢ is a relevant article if you develope sites for mobile devices.

4. Some useful hints.

For a while I have wondered what this

<div class="skipLinks">skip to: 
    <a href="#content">page content</a> | 
 <a href="pageNav">links on this page</a> | 
 <a href="#globalNav">site navigation</a> | 
 <a href="#siteInfo">footer (site information)</a> 
</div>

code in my DreamWeaver templates meant. Now I understand it better. Especially skip to content may be very important if you develop 3D and mobile sites. Here

Skip to Main Content Links are Important (2nd hit on Google)

is John's (Webnaut's) advice on that subject.

5. Navigation.

I have seen some webmasters advice that the above mentioned 3D and mobile sites ought to have navigation at the top ot the page, while other seem to take the opposite view, that navigation should be at the bottom of the page. If you use <li>Link here</li> combined with CSS styling and the same design for submenus, Se Bots should have no problems with your menus.

6. Conclusion.

Advice:

1. Think thoroughly about your tags and markup for 3D (flash etc) and mobile sites.
2. Semantic text content at the top of pages telling a short story may be good food for the bots.
3. Use well designed menus and skip to content in your markup.
4. There may be an advantage in putting dynamic content in semantic <div> tags.

[NateDesmond]

Neat article! Thanks for posting it!

[MJW]

Originally Posted by kgun

Nearly daily, on foreign and Norwegian Tv wee see robots that become more and more human in their actions. Yesterday I saw robots "playing soccer", fairly impressive.

It may not be a human but it sure walks like human, look at this.

Excuse me for the off-topic post, thought it would be an interesting link to share

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by MJW

It may not be a human but it sure walks like humans, look at this.

Excuse me for the off-topic post, thought it would be an interesting link to share

Scary:

YouTube - Boston Dynamics Big Dog (new video March 200

I dont want that thing chasing after me.

[chandrika]

Originally Posted by MJW

It may not be a human but it sure walks like human, look at this.

Excuse me for the off-topic post, thought it would be an interesting link to share

Wow, amazing, I wonder how long till they combine robotics with genetic engineering? They may feasibly be able to grow a robot skin using stem cells.

[kgun]

Genetic Algorithms are used in finance to select a population of feasible investment opportunities.

I think it is also uesd in search:

Amazon.com: Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning: David E. Goldberg: Books

[wige]

Of course, lets not forget the DARPA challenge which has produced at least five prototype autonomous land vehicles (including the Crusher prototype, and the already combat fielded TerraMax and others), and the current military estimates that deployed field strength in Iraq and Afghanistan will be increased by 40% by the end of 2009 through the addition of robotic "personnel"...

[kgun]

Search for

waking dead

a BBC game page is the first hit here.

and

"waking dead"

The first three hits here are links to Amazon pages.

The game is definitely not for children.

If this is off topic, back to topic.