Working as a developer for an SEO focused company like Blueclaw I have to make every effort to ensure the final HTML produced for any page I am working on is optimised for the search engines (well duh!). A big thing for me is to cut out any bloated markup, in this post I am going to cover how to use javascript (in this case JQuery however the techniques can easily be transferred to any other framework or just in plain old vanilla js ) to help reduce this bloated pages, not only to help streamline your code for SEO but also giving you the added benefit of speeding up page loads.
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SEO for X-Cart – 4 simple modifications to optimise your store
Recently the majority of e-commerce projects we have been working on here at Blueclaw have been using the x-cart platform and being a company that prides itself on its SEO services we strive to ensure the on-site optimisation of all the sites we produce is top notch.
While producing these sites there are a number of modifications we regularly carry out to the x-cart code to improve its already strong search engine optimisation and in this post and I will share some of my secrets so if you are running an x-cart shop you too can benefit from them.
Is bad customer service good for SEO in ecommerce?
Today I came across a story in the New York Times about a rogue internet trader who runs a website selling designer sunglasses called DecorMyEyes. The article covers the story of Clarabelle Rodriguez who found the afore mentioned site when searching Google for Lafont glasses. Her story of the terrible service followed by harassment by the website owner is disappointing, though unfortunately it is not that unheard of and another example of the practices of the few that damage the trust in Internet retailers for the many.
However where the story really becomes interesting is when it explains how the site in question got number one positions in Google results for many designer sunglasses related search terms and it is something that the unscrupulousness website owner is quite happy to brag about.
It seems in this age where so many internet shoppers are quick to voice their complaints about such services on blogs, forums and the like, the owner of this particular site quickly realised that such bad reviews were inadvertently resulting in back links from highly reputable sites such as Get Satisfaction.com (a page rank 7 site). The website owner in question (who goes by several aliases) even brags about this on one of the review sites and claims he now actively gives bad service in a hope to receive more such reviews and the resultant link juice they bring with them. He also claims that as the complaints have increased so has his websites organic traffic and hence sales.
Now obviously I am by no means condoning the practices of this dodgy dealer, however from an SEO point of view it is quite an impressive campaign and highlights a problem with the process of how Google ranks site based on incoming links without being able to distinguish the context of them, be it a glowing review or a condemning complaint.
I double checked and it does seem the author of this particular site was clever enough to make sure they did not put a link to decormyeyes.com, as I am sure a link from the NY Times would have only done further wonders for the site’s rankings.
You can read the full article here however in a typical underhanded newspaper site it is spread over 8 pages in order to increase their page impressions and advertisement views.
Google Instant, the effect on web traffic
So as you are probably aware Google’s latest search innovation google instant that gives predictive search results and has been launched to much fanfare today. Google says it will speed up search and get people their results faster. This is done by using an AJAX technique ( technically as it doesn’t use XML but JSON in it’s response I guess it is AJAJ but that doesn’t sound as good) with a HTTP request being sent after every letter you type which returns an updated set of results.
Now from a usability point of view this a great, however it comes at an expense as each of these requests uses up valuable bandwidth. A quick test we performed searching for the term designer shoes, resulted in 11 requests and which totalled just over 100KB in the JSON responses (that doesn’t include extras such as any maps or images that may also be returned for irrelevant predicted results), a search for golf clothing gave 9 requests and 85KB. Now these figures on their own are not massive, but if you take into account the amount of searches done on globally on google everyday (over a billion) and if each of these is resulting in say extra 50KB of internet traffic then that works out at approximately 46 Terabytes of extra traffic on the internet every day*.
So as this new feature is designed to speed up searching, could it have the opposite effect on the rest of internet browsing? It will be interesting to see whether or not all this extra traffic will slow down the rest of the web.
Google’s new Doodle a ploy to get more Chrome users on OSX?
There has been quite a buzz today around the net about the new Google Doodle with interactive dots ( if you haven’t seen it yet checkout the Google homepage ). It uses a nice little bit of JavaScript and CSS3 to animate a group of HTML “dots” to form the Google logo and interact with the mouse pointer.
However one person in the Blueclaw office is unable to view this in his browser of choice, Mark one of our designers who like all hippy creative types chooses to use OSX and browses the web using Safari 5. Instead of the much talked about doodle Mark is greeted with an message telling him to install Google Chrome for “A faster way to browse the web”.
Safari on OSX does not show the doodle but an install chrome button
Now seeing as chrome and Safari use a very similar version of the Webkit rendering engine and Safari supports the border-radius CSS property to used to make the dots there seems no reason why the doodle would not work in this browser. On checking the homepage source code on both Safari and Chrome it seems that the JavaScript for the doodle is not served up to OSX Safari at all so some browser detection is done server side and for some reason a decision has been made to serve OSX Safari users a version of the page without the doodle.
But why is this done? Our best guess is that it is a ploy by Google to get more OSX users to install Chrome to be able to
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