SVG Crawl Experiment - December 2010

Aim: To determine what are the biggest ranking factors for SVG files. To find out whether SVG files influence natural SERP ranking of the page they are included on and to see how best to go about this.

Method: Place a few differently formatted SVG files into a web page that does not mention the keywords and keep an eye on the results using SERP and server log data.

Experiment:

Infographic 1: An SVG file as it is exported from Adobe Illustrator

Infographic 2: An SVG file with the <title> and <desc> attributes added at the beginning of the file

Infographic 3: An SVG file with the <title> and <desc> attributes added at the end of the file

Results:

Day one: This experiment site gets crawled by google and added to the search index. No SVG files appear in the index.

Search term: "site:http://www.andyjamesdavies.com" shows the page. Search term: "site:http://www.andyjamesdavies.com filetype:svg" returns no results. Also no SVG files found in google image search for "site:http://www.andyjamesdavies.com".

Day two - Day 10: No change to the results, the SVG files simply arn't being crawled by google.

Conclusions: Due to the SVG files not being crawled by Google I can only presume that the way that these files were included into this page mean that google ignores them. Because of this I will run a second experiment to see what different embedding techniques provide the desired crawl.