Thursday, April 15, 2010
More Real Time Search from Google
Twitter Traffic Volumes and Trends
When you search on Google there is an option to the left top that says +Show Options, if you click on that a sidebar opens with various options, one of which in the top set, is Updates. If you choose this option, once the feature is rolled out by Google in the next few days, you will see a screen like this;
The chart at the top shows the volume of traffic on Twitter regarding that subject. To see what the volume was a month ago, lets say, just press the arrow to move the period of time backwards. Trending of topics is easy to see with this facility.
Find New Twitter Friends
In Google Labs they have introduced Follow Finder for Twitter where you add the twitter name for someone, but do not put in the @ symbol as I did initially, and Google will show you suggestions as to who you might like to follow and on the right a list of Twitterers who have similar followers.
If like me you have found the search function in Twitter itself very frustrating you may well find this useful. If you want to follow any of the suggested contacts just click on the follow button and they will be added automatically to the list of people you follow on Twitter.
Google Uses Website Load Speed
Google has after a lot of warning introduced site speed as a part of its algorithm which means that it will take into account how slow the site loads when deciding which websites to list in its search results. They give 2 reasons for this, (i) User experience as they have found that users tend to leave slow loading websites more quickly, and (ii) Resource usage as slower loading websites use more server resources.
This introduction of a new algorithm has not been fully implemented yet and only applies to searches in Google.com which are performed in English, however I am pretty sure it will be rolled out across the whole system soon. In the Google Webmaster blog they say;
While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.
For some time in Google Webmaster tools there has been an option under Labs to look at Site Performance. Here you will see a chart displaying over time the average time it takes for your website to load over the last few months. Unfortunately these results include countries with incredibly low speed internet connections so if for example your website is only aimed at customers in the UK you may still find you have a low load speed if a lot of people in the USA, where some internet connections are very slow, are accessing your website. In addition they also take into account the load speed of logins to admin as found on Wordpress or other Content Management System (CMS) websites. I do not consider this fair as these are not relevant to user experience and we should have the option to exclude these pages.
Anyway what do we do about improving load speed?
1. If your server supports gzip then gzip all your files,
2. Optimise any images so that they are as light as possible, an excellent online tool for this can be found at Image Resizer.
3. Do not have separate CSS style sheets, combine them all into one,
4. Combine all javascript used into one file.
5. With html code and css remove unnecessary spaces, comments etc if gzip is not enabled on your server.
Related Posts:
Google Uses Website Load Speed
Website Speed and Admin Pages
New Webmaster Tools Top Search
Google Webmaster Tools now have an updated Top Search Section on the dashboard.
Here you can see the impressions and clickthroughs for the top search terms used by searchers.
Impressions are the number of times that your site’s pages appeared in the search results for the query. Clickthrough is the number of times searchers clicked on that query’s search results to visit a page from your site. In addition to impressions and clickthrough numbers, you’ll also see a list of your site’s pages that were linked to from the search results for that search query.
If you click on the more link you will go through to a full page where you can see a chart of the results;
Under the chart is a list of all the search terms and if you are focussing on particular keywords you can, using the top right hand box select that particular keyword to see all of the phrases entered into the search engine that contained that particular keyword. Regional information can also be obtained by selecting from the countries drop down and if you want to look at a particular range of dates, for example following a particular campaign you have run, you can also choose to look at these selected results.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Googles Matt Cutts SEO Tips III
Now the final part of my quick summary of some Webmaster Help videos;
Why Does The Link: Operator Not Work?
Matt explained that Google only shows a small selection of the inbound links to your website when you use this search term. To get the full list of inbound links you need to look in Google Webmaster Tools. He said that this was so that your competitors cannot find out who backlinks to you but I must admit that did seem a bit lame to me as there are so many other tools on the internet that you can use freely to show the backlinks to any website.
Does Pagerank flow from Nofollow links on Sites like Wikipaedia?
He said categorically that PR does not flow on any nofollow links. He explained that the point of getting backlinks from authorititive websites who use nofollow is so that people find your website from these well-known sites then visit your website and add their own link to you which hopefully will NOT be nofollow.
Does Pagerank Flow Through URL Shortened Links?
Matt said that if the URL shortener has been set up properly with a 301 redirect then it will be treated as any other 301 redirect and PR will flow.
My next post will be on Matt’s suggestions for link building.
Googles Matt Cutts SEO Tips II
Now continuing my summary of some Webmaster videos;
Can I Use More Than One h1 On My Web Page?
Matt’s answer was that if there are 2 distinct sections for example on your page then it is fine to have one h1 at the top and then another further down the page where the other topic starts but just don’t overdo it as the algorithm will penalise you if the page is swamped with them particularly if they are made to look just like ordinary text.
Does the Order of Headers on My Web Page Matter?
He says that the order does not matter as the algorithm will still try and process the page even if the syntax is wrong. He said that approximately 40% of pages on the web have serious syntax errors but if possible they try to still process them. I think the conclusion is that you should get the coding and order correct if you can but, if like the person who asked the question, you are a beginner and using a template which has syntax errors then not to worry about it.
Should I use an Underscore or a Hyphen as a Separator?
Matt says in his video to use hyphens as underscores are not at present seen as word separators by the algorithm.
How Do I SEO My Website On A Budget?
His suggestions were to start small either in geographical area or by choosing a niche part of your market. Develop your placeand reputation in that small market then widen your range and build out over time. In addition he said to be original and creative and to make sure you provide for example advice, videos, an original blog etc.
More to follow in a bit….
Googles Matt Cutts SEO Tips
I often intend to watch the Google webmaster videos Matt Cutts puts on Youtube however life is too busy most of the time but this morning I had a couple of spare hours so thought I would watch a few and summarise some brief points here.
Tables or Divs - do they affect SEO?
Matt says no they do not affect at all how the Googlebot treats the website.
Should you Use -9000px for the Logo for Your Website?
This matter intrigued me as I am on a forum for web designers, a large proportion of whom are graphic designers and I often end up in arguments with them regarding this point - they favour this practice whereas I feel it is unnecessary. Well in June 2009 Matt Cutts said that this method of placing the logo text way off the page is indeed hidden text and should not be used and instead the alt attribute should be used. Controversially he also referred to the alt TAG as opposed to alt ATTRIBUTE, as I recall, which is hilarious as that is another of the subjects that people on the forum get pretty hot under the collar about.
Should I Use Keywords in My URLs?
Matt’s answer was that it helps but it’s not overly important. He said to only use 2 or 3 keywords and to not worry too much about the order they are in.
As I don’t want my posts to be too long I will carry on with these snippets of information in the next post.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Website Speed and Admin Pages
If you have been monitoring your website’s load speed under Webmaster Tools you may well have seen that the slowest page is your admin or login pages. However these pages are not relevant to normal visitors if this admin page is simply for you to edit the website content. As the times for loading these pages can be quite high we justifiably are concerned that having the load time for admin pages included in the calculation for load speed will adversely affect our performance in search results following Google’s announcement that website load speed will become increasingly important. Naturally I assumed that Google would be excluding these pages from their calculation however not so! I found a recent thread in the Webmaster Central Forum where a Google employee confirmed that even if you have excluded pages using your robots.txt file, it will still be included in the page speed assessment. This really is not fair as these pages have no impact on the visitors viewing experience and so websites with admin login for editing should not be penalised in this way. See below the answer given;
12/22/09
Is there any way to exclude part of the website being counted toward stats in the Site Performance?
I have a self-hosted Wordpress blog and it appears what the admin section of my blog is the slowest part of the website (9 of 10 pages in “Example pages” are related to Admin section), however I am the only person who loads those pages.
I am very interested to know the stats for the rest of the website, which my visitors are exposed to.
Is there any way to exclude Admin part stats being counted towards the Site Performance?A Google Employee on 12/23/09
Susan Moskwa (Google Employee)
Paraphrasing a response from another thread: “Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to exclude them from the display at the moment. In the future, we might consider removing roboted-out URLs, so if you robot the admin pages out (in addition to password protecting them), that will be the correct and sufficient.”
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Google Webmaster Central Quiz
Google have now released the answers to their quiz. It is a useful list which you can read here.
The answers aren’t always much use without the questions so find these here. however note that this quiz is now closed.
The answers to the webmaster quiz form a useful checklist covering many different areas associated with web design.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Duplicate Content
This is a summary of Google’s guidelines on duplicate content, for more information search the rest of the SEO Blog.
Examples of duplicate content includes:
Duplicate pages for mobile devices
E-commerce items available via multiple URLs
Printer-only versions of web pages
Multiple pages with mostly identical content
In search results Google wants to show pages with different information, which is why Google can end up dropping your page from its SERPs if it appears duplicated.
To avoid problems with duplicate content Google suggests the following.
Use 301 redirection if you have re-organised the pages in your website so that the old URL redirects to the new version. Hopefully the pageranking will also transfer however my experience is that this can take some considerable time and in some cases the PR just does not transfer so think carefully if you decide to restructure your website. 301 redirects are carried out in your .htaccess file.
Have consistent linking within your website. If you use the link http://www.site.co.uk/page/ then use that throughout your site, ie do not use http://www.site.co.uk/page and http://www.site.co.uk/page/index.htm to all direct to the same page.
Use the correct domain type ie if you are a UK company use .co.uk not .com.
If you syndicate your articles ensure that each website showing your content includes a link back to your original article and ask for a noindex meta tag so that search engines do not index the syndicated version of the article.
Use Webmaster Tools to advise your preferred domain for indexing, ie the www. or the non www.
If you have some text or legal notice on many pages of your website then just put the full article/notice on one page only and put a link on all of the other pages.
If you are setting up a new page on your website put noindex in the meta tags until the page has content on it.
Google says,
Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other methods. If search engines can’t crawl pages with duplicate content, they can’t automatically detect that these URLs point to the same content and will therefore effectively have to treat them as separate, unique pages. A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel=”canonical” link element, the URL parameter handling tool, or 301 redirects. In cases where duplicate content leads to us crawling too much of your website, you can also adjust the crawl rate setting in Webmaster Tools.
My post on rel=canonical
If for some reason your website is removed from the SERPs check in webmaster tools as to why, then make changes to the site and submit the website to Google for reconsideration.
