After playing around with Google Wave for a few days, it has become apparent that this is not going to become a major tool for search engine optimization. While Wave is fun to mess around with, and may become an important tool in other industries, there doesn’t seem to be much of a reason to think Wave is going to change SEO.
After looking through Wave and how the code works, it looks like there’s some JavaScript and an iFrame that search engines may have trouble crawling. Wave is powered with HTML 5, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all of the content as it shows up when it’s embedded is strictly HTML. Wave is an application that can be embedded in Web sites, and the likelihood of the links in Waves being followed at all seems minimal. It’s possible that content might be crawled, but I wouldn’t count on it.
One of the only ways for Wave content to be truly crawlable would be if Google and other search engines hardcoded something in the algorithms, which could happen. There isn’t much of a way to test this until Wave becomes public and anyone can see the waves embedded on Web sites. As it stands now, only those who have Wave accounts can view embedded content.
Even though Wave isn’t a game-changer for SEO, that doesn’t mean it should be completely ignored. Wave is a way to engage people on your Web site and keep them coming back in the same way comments or forums do. Wave may not have any real on-page SEO benefit, but it’s possible that people will be more likely to link to a page that has an engaging wave in addition to regular content.
You may have noticed that everything on the seoworldwide.com Web site is currently redirecting you to this blog. This is because we are undergoing a massive redesign, and the other parts of the site will be down temporarily while changes are being made. The blog will function normally, but everything else is going to be offline for some time.
