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As the mighty ‘Claw’s resident Apple zealot, imagine my joy upon checking macrumors.com last night and discovering that Apple had announced the release of a new set of tools for the creation of iAds on the Apple Developer site. You could say Christmas came early for me and my pants.
In a recent Google Webmaster Central forum thread, Google Employee John Mu was quizzed by user Nathan Sweet about whether the new HTML5 standard would provide any additional benefit to on-page SEO and in particular whether Google would pay any attention to HTML5 semantic tags. John’s response basically states that at the moment Google does not use HTML5 tags in its ranking algorithm and that until there is sufficient up-take of this new standard (and the browser support to go with it), that Google had no plans to do so stating.
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
Most websites will use the http://www.website.com structure as their main website URL and this will be the address used in link building campaigns. However in some circumstances, you may find that Google has indexed two versions of your homepage. E.g.
These are called “canonical” URLs and for the best search engine results, you should get rid of all but one, and stick to it!
Use the Google site command to see if there are any extraneous URLs. Type in site:www.website.com to see what pages are indexed. If you have a large site, also try site:www.website.com/index.html or whatever your “index” page is. If both exist, you should go through your website links and point all your “home” links to just one of them. Also consider putting a 301 redirect on extra pages to
We are at SMX Advanced London today – just heard a great talk by Mikkel deMib Svendsen (@deMib) on getting rid of stuff on your website which will speed up your site. The relationship is like this : the faster your server responds, the faster the site is crawled. The faster the site is crawled, the faster new content is indexed. The more you update your site, the better rankings you could get.
1 – Check text to code ratio – count characters in clean text compared to full code. If it is below 10%, you need to do something about it.
2 – Get rid of view_state – it takes up loads of space. (40,000 useless characters)
3 and 4 – Keep Javascript and CSS in just one external stylesheet
5 – Remove empty containers
6 – Remove all comment tags – it’s for programmers, not search engines. Use scripts to scrape out the comment tags.
Martin Woods: William we are saying the same thing, I agree that...
Barry Adams: The logic in Gary's 'solution' (and I use the term...
William Cross: Martin: google would never SEE the block. ONLY the...