After searching your Gmail, have you ever wanted to turn off the highlighting?

The power of search is one of the things that makes Gmail one of the best email solutions available.

Have you ever searched for an email (using a keyword) and noticed that the keywords you used were highlighted in the resulting email? This feature is very useful and mimics traditional search engine behavior, where keywords are bolded in a couple sentences from each result.

The highlighting can actually be controlled by using the two icons that appear in the top-right of the search results page:

Unfortunately, these icons are identical, so the user has no idea which one to click. The left highlighter icon will actually turn on highlighting (only if it’s off), and the right highlighter icon will turn off highlighting (only if it’s on). The design is very salient because it doesn’t match the user’s mental model, which is primarily developed from previous experience (with computers and in the real-world).

Here’s a design that should match a user’s mental model, because it’s very similar to an on/off button:

On:

Off:

Little Big Details

This may seem like a very small issue, but imagine how many people must have encountered it. Small details like this should not be overlooked. The blog Little Big Details does a great job at demonstrating how small features can make a big difference. One of my favorite posts was their demonstration that the position of the close button stays the same in Chrome, allowing users to effortlessly close more than one tab. Small details like that go unnoticed by the majority of users, which is actually a good thing. When users have a frustration-free experience, they can focus more on their goals (which is why they’re on the site in the first place!).

Check your Robots.txt file: The problem may be as simple as your robots.txt file is disallowing search engines from crawling your site.  Type websiteurl.com/robots.txt to see if you are currently disallowing search engines.  If you see something like this …

you are actually telling search engines not to index your site.  By simply removing the ” / ” you will allow search engines to start indexing your site. The ” / ” is representative of your site’s root path. So that essentially means that you are telling search engines when they visit http://www.yourcompany.com to NOT index your site.

You may also be restricting search engines in your source code.  Go to ‘View’ in your web browser and view the ‘Page Source’ or CTRL+U.  Do a “Find” for <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">.  If you see "NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW", as you can imagine it tells search engines not to index or follow the page.  Simply remove that piece of code, to allow it to be indexed.  Be sure to check all pages in question, since this code may be on some or all of your pages.

Check your Site Structure: For large websites you may have a lot of directories in your site.  If your directories go 3, 4, or even 5 directories deep off the root level, it may be hard for search engines to crawl those inner pages.  Try keeping your directories as close to the root directory as possible.

Check your Site Navigation: Your website navigation may not be search engine friendly, meaning search engines are unable to follow the interior pages through your navigation.  If your navigation is developed using flash or programmed in javascript, it may inhibit search engines to access your interior pages.  To fix this issue, have your navigation programmed using a href links.  If you do not want to re-program your navigation, try adding footer text links at the bottom of each page.  This will give the search engines a second way of accessing your interior pages.

Check your CMS: If you are pulling in content dynamically through a CMS or some sort of database, search engines may have a problem indexing your content. Here is an example of the differences between dynamic and static urls.

Dynamic URL

http://www.websiteurl.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date

Search Friendly Static URL

http://www.websiteurl.com/forums/indexing-issues.html

The problem with dynamic URLs, is that these URLs do not exist.  They pull in content on the fly, based on what the user requests.  If the URLs do not exist, search engines will not be able to find these pages and index them.  In order to fix this URL issue, use a URL re-writer to modify the URL so it creates static looking pages from dynamic pages.  This will give the impression to search engines that these are static pages.  It will also help with SEO, if you use keyword-rich URLs.  For some CMS’s, it may be hard to find a URL re-writer off the shelf.  Almost all of the mainstream CMS’s like Drupal and Wildflower all have URL re-writers you can use.

Google Website Penalty: I recently wrote a post on how to detect when Google penalizes your website.  If you notice that your site is not being crawled by search engines, it could possibly be that search engines have banned or penalized your website and they are not adding your site to their index.