Speed Up Your Site, and Your Google Crawl Rate

A recent interview with Google's head of webspam, Matt Cutts, has had a lot of SEOs disecting the replies to the clever questions posed by Eric Enge. There are some interesting things to be taken away from the interview regarding link juice passing through 301 and 302 redirects, Cutt's reaffirmation that Page Rank Sclupting is largely a waste of time, and some other little things, but not really any big juicy tips (to be expected from Cutts, who is very good at being diplomatic).



However, another small thing to come out of the interview was that Cutts also confirmed that crawling may be affected by the server you decide to use as well as the PageRank of your site and it's internal architecture. Using shared servers means that crawl rate will be slower, as googlebot will be crawling other sites possibly on the same server, and will then abandon the crawl if things are slow.

For more details on Speeding up your site for Google, see my other posts:

Speed up your page with htaccess file.

Speed up your page with gzip compression.

Are you looking to improve your site in Google? I offer website optimisation and conversion optimisation for sites, and would be happy to have a chat about the possibilities. I also offer AdWords Managment in Barcelona and around.

Goodbye to SearchWiki!

Even more personalisation this week coming straight from the Google Blog. They're now introducing stars to flag results so that they always show up for you. The example given is so that your favourite American Football team always shows up if you type NFL, for example. Starring your results can be done right in the SERP page of through the toolbar.

The good news is that this (along with sidewiki for those who like to leave comments) is to replace Google's silly "searchwiki" idea. I hope no-one was workingon that niche software I was thinking about?! hehe. According to the official post,

"In our testing, we learned that people really liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but they didn't like changing the order of Google's organic search results."

Wow. People reaaaaalllllyyyy trust Google, and their search results, and I suppose there's the idea that if you change your results and can never change it back again, you might be missing out on new websites, news, current trends, etc. etc. It's a sensible move from google.



And just so that you know, personalised results are ALWAYS on. You can, of course, see the results WITHOUT this personalisation. Look at the image above, and you'll see a screen shot of being able to view the search results for Barcelona Restaurants without your personal history, for example. To reach this screen, you first have to click the "view customizations" link, which is cleverly positioned top right, where many people won't notice it (space usually reserved for AdWords).



As of today, I'm still seeing the searchwiki links at the bottom of the results pages, so maybe it'll be rolled out slowly over certain data centres before eliminating completely.

Are you unhappy with your website's position in the search engines? I can offer website promotion and help move your site up in the list. And for an instant traffic boost, I also manage Pay Per Click campaigns, too.

Google Experimental Search

Google is always experimenting with it's own site. Yesterday saw the release of their SEO Report Card (and they're not as good as they should/could be!), and who can forget the admitting of the 41 shades of blue experiment?

Well, there are some smaller little experiments going on, as well. Head on over to Google Experimental and you can opt in to some of the experiments going on.



At the moment, for example, there are some funny experiments with quick keys on your keyboard - like using "/" key to put the cursor in the search box, for example. On my own keyboard this isn't really a shortcut at all, as I have to press shift and 7 for that to work, so it's probably just as quick to move the mouse and click. There's also a way to move up and down results and then hit the enter key to open - thus leaving the seprs page. Maybe it's me, but with the inclusion of tabs in all browsers, I always open any result in a new browser, because if I follow a few deep links in, but want to go back to the SERP page, then I don't have to hit "back" so many times, just go back to the tab. But anyway...there are still some cool little experiments you can play around with to improve your experience, and with such fantastic amounts of visitors using Google each day, they have perfect situations in which to carry out these experiments.

Are you looking to improve your own website's performance? Contact me at Barcelona SEO for a chat to see how we can improve conversions. Or if you prefer to get down to the nitty gritty, I also offer SEO Training in Barcelona.