Better site load time is appreciated by Google and sites which offer a better user experience are ranked better. Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video about this and said that approximately 1 out of 100 searches are impacted by the site speed ranking factor. He said “that it would actually change the ranking to a noticeable degree.”

Coming back to Instant Pages, Google says, it is no big effort to make a site work correctly with prerendering. The traffic will be measured in Webmaster Tools as before and only results the user visits will be counted. Google has also recommended the Page Visibility API for webmasters with sites that keep track of pageviews. The API allows webmasters to know when prerendering is happening and they can keep those out of their statistics.

For more insights into lessening your site’s load time, learn about Google Page Speed Online Tool.

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You can find the backlink reports by this route:

• Social reportsà Click on specific URL (Pages)à Click on the Activity Stream tab (it is located above the graphs)à Land at new page with social data conversations related to this specific pageà Click on the Events tabà Find Backlinks information.
• To view each backlink URL you can click on ‘View Activity’ to visit the page with link, or Choose ‘View Page’ to see the page linked.

There is another way to find the centralized information in the reports. You can follow this path:

Social reportsà Click on specific URL (Pages)à Click on the Activity Stream tab (it is located above the graphs)à click on “ALL” (at the top of the page) to see all activity across all the pages in chronological order.

What do you think of this new backlink URL report? Will it keep you ahead of the Penguin now? Do share your views.

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Those aren’t empty words either as the features showing up in this new version seem to really do the trick when it comes to creating better ads for both creators and consumers. The first of which is the new ability to use multiple ad networks with AdMob. The best part about the AdMob Ad Network Mediation is that its free. Any developer can “allocate inventory across many top 3rd party ad networks on a country-by-country basis.”

The next feature will certainly be helpful for developers, but it will also be a great improvement for end users like me who demand that ad banners fill in the whole space they occupy. It’s annoying to have ads pop up in the Cracked Lite reader that don’t fill the entire space. This new application makes sure that ad banners automatically fill the space they’ve been assigned to regardless of the screen’s size. Check out the AdMob dev site for the knowledge needed to utilize these new ad banners.

In what perhaps may be the best news for developers is that AdMob SDK 6.0 is MRAID (Mobile Rich Media Ad Interface Definitions) compliant. MRAID is a “common API for mobile rich media ads running in mobile apps.” This will introduce a standard set of commands for developers who want to create media ads. It also makes it so that these type of ads can be displayed on the same app across platforms, regardless of network.

As a final aside, the iOS version of AdMob SDK no longer supports the universal device identifier. Google is working on a solution for the time being that will “benefit users, app developers and advertisers.”

You can hit up the official site for AdMob to download the newest version right now for Android and iOS. Unfortunately, the Windows Phone 7 version of AdMob is still at version 4.0.4. Who knows when it will catch up, but I’m sure Google is working on a solution.

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A report from Nathan Eddy at eWeek suggests that Google’s Project Glass glasses, unveiled last week, could just make an appearance at the event. The report is based on a research note from Global Equity Research, which Eddy reports is based on the viewpoint of Android developers. According to Eddy, the note says:

“This year, Google will have a new focus area ‘wearable devices,’ based on Android OS. Developers think Google extended this year’s Google I/O event from two days to three days, probably to accommodate this new focus area. Google will very likely open up Google AR [augmented reality] platform to the developers, so that the developers can write applications to Google Glasses, the wearable AR glasses.”

Seth Weintraub wrote on 9to5Google last week, “I am told Google has a relatively small run already available internally. I asked directly if I would be able to get a set at Google I/O, but my source said that a decision was yet-to-be made. There are over 10,000 attendees at Google I/O, so that would be a significant undertaking.”

They don’t have to be handing them out for Google to demo the glasses, or at least turn developers loose on an API. Even if there is simply an increased focus on augmented reality, it could lay some framework for glasses app potential down the line.

There are already tons of augmented reality apps for Android. Here are some examples:

We’re going to have to leave the possibility of Google glasses appearing at Google I/O in the rumor department, but it will definitely be on everybody’s minds as the event draws near. Based on the reported words of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, it sounds like the glasses won’t be ready for the public for a while, but developers could certainly help with that.

There should be no shortage of developers in attendance. Tickets sold out within 20 minutes of going on sale.

In a fascinating video from one of the Project Glass engineers, the technology’s application to contact lenses was discussed, as were the different types of apps which could be created, including: gaming, virtual reality, augmented reality, interfacing with mobile, super vision, night vision, etc.

What are some apps you’d like to see built for the Google glasses?

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Someone recently asked me about redirecting their old web pages (their old URLs) to the new URLs because they redesigned their website. Here is what they said:

We recently redesigned our website and pushed it live. However, we forgot to catalogue all of the old URLs on the old website, and therefore we have no way of knowing what the old URLs were on the site, so we can redirect them to the new URLs. Help!

Whenever you redesign your website, it’s important to set up 301 Permanent Redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs so that website visitors and the search engine bots know that the page has moved its location to a new URL. If you use a 301 Permanent Redirect (and not a meta refresh and not a 302 redirect), all of the Google PageRank, or “link juice” is “supposed to be” passed on to the new URL.

But what if you redesign your website and don’t make a list of all of your old pages? Well, there are two ways to deal with this. I actually prefer doing both, so that you make sure that you catch all of the old pages on your site.

Review Log Files for 404 Errors
First, review your website’s log files and get a list of all of the 404 errors on your site. Since the search engines crawl websites a lot, there is a good chance that most of your old web pages will result in a 404 error, and that will be on the list. You’ll also be able to see which pages have the most 404 errors, and you can pay attention to those first.

You may be able to see the 404 errors using web analytics. Depending on which web analytics tools you use, you will be able to see the site’s 404 errors. Make sure you use a web analytics tool that analyzes your site’s log files, NOT something like Google Analytics, which does NOT rely on your site’s log files. If you are using cPanel or another web host that has a control panel, you may have a program called AWStates, or Webalizer, that will do the trick. You may want to download and use Analog, which I’ve been using for over 10 years to analyze a site’s log files.

Review Webmaster Tools
After a few days of the with the site’s new design, you should start to accumulate 404 errors on your site. You can review those errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Since you’re relying on Google’s crawl to identify 404 errors, that may not be as reliable as looking at your log files. But, if you do not have access to the site’s log files, that’s the next best thing. You can also get the data in Bing’s Webmaster Tools, as well.

Other Considerations
Whenever you redesign your website, keep in mind that it’s always preferable to keep the same exact URLs that you have had in the past. Ideally, your site’s URL structure should use directories rather than actual file names for the URLs. For example:

http://www.billhartzer.com/about/

is preferred over using this:

http://www.billhartzer.com/about.html

Using directories such as /about/ is preferred because is is platform-agnostic. It is not tied to any particular type of web server (Windows versus Unix with page.html versus page.asp), and your site structure can remain in place no matter what type of Content Management System you use. You’re essentially “future proofing” your website, as we always will have directories. Even if you decide to use PHP or even ASP.Net as your back-end content management system and code, you can still keep the same exact URLs.

If you have a question for me that you would like me to answer, feel free to contact me and I’ll either answer it personally or post it here on my blog. And you can even remain anonymous, if you like.

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Recent Google Panda updates have seen Google on the look out for spamming web site’s which do not add “sufficient value” to its users. Tje introduction of a spam algorithm in the Panda update in January 2011, this one was aimed precisely at fighting spam and affected about 2% of search results. This even saw Google ban free hosting services (and all their sites using their service) from the Google index, you might remember when all the co.cc domains were removed from the index, causing thousands of sites to disappear from Google.

So in order to help these free hosting companies stay clear of a penalty or ban, they wrote this blog post with tips, including:

• Publishing a clear abuse policy and communicating it to your users to provide transparency about what is considered “spammy” activity.
• Using CAPTCHAs or other verification tools to only allow human submission and prevent the majority of automated scripts from creating sites on your hosting service.
• Monitoring for spam signals including redirects, a large number of ad blocks, and spammy keywords. Google recently announced its page layout algorithm, which penalizes sites with too many ads above-the-fold.
• Keeping track of signups and identifying spam patterns including form completion time, number of requests from the same IP address range, user-agents used during signup, and user names.
• Watching your server log files for sudden traffic spikes for a newly-created website.
• Monitoring for phishing and malware-infected pages.
• Detecting languages of newly created sites (e.g., thousands of Japanese sites appearing overnight on a Polish web hosting service)

Google’s Matt Cutts did a follow up video on this topic which is well worth a look, so I have posted it below.

The tips mentioned above could easily apply to any sites with user-generated content (e.g., forums, blogs etc) and webmasters who are considering setting up a free website. Take this as your official warning!

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