Although companies pay a great deal of money to get their message across to viewers of the Super Bowl, it appears the NFL did a poor job with its search engine optimization (SEO).
Google Trends gives internet users a snapshot of what topics are the most searched for at the moment, and presumably the most popular. As it might be expected, a great number of searches yesterday were related in some way to last night’s Super Bowl.
However, Vanessa Fox of Search Engine Land says search engines did not do a great job of giving users what they are looking for.
According to Fox, the top Google Trend yesterday was "what time does the super bowl start 2009." But she says Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Search all did a poor job of giving users a result that matched the query.
It even seems that the sites for the NFL and NBC, which broadcast the game, did not show up in these searches, which Fox attributes to information being lost in Flash. She says this reiterates the need for search engine optimization when using Flash.
"The fact is that if you want your site’s content to be found by searchers, you have to make sure you’re building it in a search-friendly way," Fox writes. "You can’t rely on the search engines to sort things out."
According to Google, the company is creating ways to crawl Flash, which may make searching easier in the future.
