E-Biz Booster Blog

Okay, now it is official.

Google finally announces that page loading time has become one of the ~200 signals (↑) that influence rankings in its search engine. If you are a little bit tech savvy when it comes to web technologies, check out the post. There you’ll find resources and tips on how to tackle the issue.

The Google Webmaster tool (↑) also offers a new function at Dashboard / Labs / Site Performance which gives you a hint how your site is doing right now.

I already told you in September, 2009, how to speed up your website.

Now it’s time to get going.

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A very quick insider note.

The infamous NOFOLLOW attribute has been removed from this blog for the backlinks of all trackbacks.

I think, why not share some appreciation for (quality!) bloggers who write about my posts.

Right now this blog still does not accept PINGBACKS, but TRACKBACKS are highly welcome (quality only!). Regular comments are still not followed.

Now, it's up to me to write and distribute posts which are worth to be written about.

I think about upgrading and enabling PINGBACKS as well.
Let me think …

Of course, I will monitor, possibly moderate trackbacks, and update the comment policy accordingly shortly.

Yours
John W. Furst

It just comes to my mind that I am writing posts about web site development issues only when something bothers me. Like the DNS problems with my ISP that I had in July this year.

It might not only be me who has noticed that many “Social Media Rich Web Sites” and blogs load very slowly. Even in a modern browser on a new computer.

The first guess is:

“It's all the widgets and external components they load.”

But it is not only how much you load. It is also about in what order you load it … and from what servers … So what do we usually have to deal with:

• many images
• various CSS style sheets
• Javascript files for improved navigation and AJAX trickery within the site
• Javascript widgets and iframes for interaction with other sites
• Flash files
• Java applets
• … etc.

The browser has to request each file individually. Some files are cached in your browser and will be downloaded only once (if your web server is setup correctly).

Then there are other cases where your web server might have to wait for data from third party web sites before it can complete to build a dynamic web page and deliver it to the browser.

The richness of Web 2.0 doesn't make it necessarily easier to be a great webmaster. It's true that widgets can be dropped into a site and add substantial interactivity to it in matter of minutes, but optimizing a site for performance hasn't become much easier.

A lot of different elements to deal with.

Examples:

• affiliate banners or affiliate data feeds
• RSS news feeds
• embedded video and audio content
• Digg, Reddit, and other social media votes
• Twitter, Facebook and Disqus widgets
• User avatars like from myblogcatalog.com or gravatar.com
• etc.

The list is really endless.

And last but not least the HTML part of the page itself (this one single file) could be already pretty big by itself. Or don't you have 20+ comments on your average blog post?

And don't forget, if you are running a content management system like a blog all this content is created on the fly out of a database. (Or are you using Wordpress Super Cache already — or whatever it is called.)

You will notice the longer you have been working on your website the slower it usually gets.

Time to speed up your web site again

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I have heard and read about a lot of problems with the Domain Name Service (DNS-Service) on an almost global level. I am not sure—nor did I look deeper into it—if this is related to the allegedly committed cyber-attacks originating from North Korea.

Web surfers in the USA, in Europe, in Asia, and South America reported on Twitter that they are having troubles to reach specific web sites or any sites on the Internet in general.

I did not even notice those conversations unless I couldn’t reach my (this) blog all of a sudden. I realized very quickly that the site is up and running and as a matter of fact this is the very only domain I noticed that I have problems with.

The vast majority of my readers won’t even notice the outage. It’s related to a problem my local ISP Telefonica seems to have with their DNS-service.

In less technical terms:

A DNS service translated the domain name into an IP-address and tells the browser on what server the web pages you are trying to reach are hosted.

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Does this sound like a dumb question to you?

Only because you have the “Hacker Safe Logo” legitimately on your Web site doesn’t mean your web-based business is 100% safe.

Your site doesn’t need to be attacked by criminals there are many different possibilities for having your web based income stream disrupted. Now I remember that I wrote about the subject of protecting your virtual assets back in December 2007, too.

Think about those scenarios:
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Finally following up my previous blog post about the SEO improvements on this, my E-Biz Booster Blog. I promise I'll keep this post as short as possible and to the point. And I must warn you. This post might be a bit straight forward and advanced. If you have questions leave a comment and I'll be happy to explain what needs to be explained in further detail. At the end of this blog post I refer to other bloggers who are going a similar route. Kind of social proof that I have moved in the right direction with the latest changes in the inner workings here.

I originally stated, “I don't care about rewriting the short versions of the URL.” That means if someone typed for example, http://blogdev1.fcon21.biz/230/ for an article about email marketing tips, into the browser or clicked a corresponding link the navigation bar of his browser showed exactly that URL. Not anymore.

I argued it does not matter as long as the content is what the user is looking for and the search engines can use the meta information for the canonical URL from the HTML Head section.

Well, that was theory.

Rewrite non-canonical versions of your post URL

Not all search engines and other types of robots are taking advantage of the meta information for the canonical URL at this point.

I noticed problems with Google Adsense when requesting a particular page with using the shortcut URL. The AdSense bot did not know what the page is about and served no or totally off-topic ads in many cases. I knew this is not very good. So I needed to fix this problem.

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