Keywords, Mobile Barcodes and Mobile SEO?

Thanks for hearing my voice!

Ron,
what about a vertical search for barcodes only - so when uses keyword search for special offers? Would that work within the pattern recognition software?

Is anyone working on this?
Bena

Hi Bena,

This is a very interesting discussion, and it has no real parallels in traditional SEO that I know of. Thanks for the post.

The only thing that I can think of that would be similar would be indexing multiple URLs. The search engines might not index a bar code, as it wouldn’t be seen as original content, but a portal to original content, similar to vanity URLs being used in print advertising and redirected to the canonical web site. It’s hard to tell how the engines would react, however, as there aren’t many parallels to this in traditional SEO. Sort of like discussing hypotheticals or science fiction.

As for letting the engines know what that bar code is relevant to, I would imagine that there would be multiple ways to include keywords, but I don’t know that they would be necessary. Google does own Neven’s iScout now, which is a pretty sophisticated visual search technology that doesn’t even need bar codes to return relevant information for images. It would seem that they would be able to recognize bar codes as they could faces and such, without embedding alt text or any keywords at all.

Perhaps there’s someone from Mobot or iScout here that would like to comment?

Either way, since the content that’s returned is usually already indexed under a URL, I don’t know that the engines would be interested in indexing it again, given their historical stance on duplicate content.

Great post!

Hi Bena,

My point in bringing up mobile visual search is only to say that search engines won’t necessarily need keywords next to bar codes in order to determine the relevance of the bar code. I’m sure bar code search can be done independently, but I believe the presence of that technology would allow Google to return relevant results for a bar code without embedding text.

Re: Neven Vision, do you think the acquisition might have had something to do with Google’s recent patent for reading text in images and video?

Very interested in the Mobot CEO interview.

You’re right about duplicate content in mobile search, which I noted a while ago in the mobile SEO white paper. What might make it different is the fact that bar codes by themselves aren’t original content, but doorways to content. Google’s mobile search indexing of multiple versions of content seems to be a boon to the webmaster who makes content accessible to multiple mobile devices, when most aren’t making content accessible to a single mobile device. It’s the same content, just coded differently. In the case of bar codes, all of the content is independent of the bar code. As such, the bar code would mostly be analogous to indexing multiple URLs with the same content, which at this point I don’t believe Google mobile does.

At any rate, I think we can both agree that it will be interesting to see what happens in this space. Thanks for introducing the topic.

As for your last comment, I wouldn’t say manipulation, but the basic premise behind SEO is that there are certain signals that a search engine will interpret to determine the relevance to a query, and that being aware of these signals and developing content with this awareness will affect the search engine results. In my experience the same is true for mobile SEO. What differs is the signals and the queries. But, simply put, absolutely. Being aware of the elements that the mobile search engines like oneSearch pay attention to and acting on that knowledge can affect the search results.

Maybe its good to go back to the real differentiator between mobile search and online search and then brainstorm what the best SEO technology is and what would the best search engine approach. The discussion till now have been derailing many times because they where technology driven.

Cheers, Ron