blog asymptoticdesign.co.uk http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog blog about SEO and... blogging Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:36:27 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Google presents Page Speed tool http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/12/03/google-page-speed-tool/ http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/12/03/google-page-speed-tool/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:49:30 +0000 admin http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/?p=94 Google added to Google Webmaster Tools in "Labs>Site performance" information about pages load time and presents to webmasters the Page Speed tool that gives detailed information and guidelines on improving page performance. The official Google blog article How fast is your site explains the site performance metric. Information on how to install and use Page Speed is at Using Page Speed and there is a fantastic collection of guidelines at Web Performance Best Practices.

]]> http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/12/03/google-page-speed-tool/feed/ 0 Google adds thumbnail page previews to search results http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/12/03/google-adds-thumbnail-page-previews-to-search-results/ http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/12/03/google-adds-thumbnail-page-previews-to-search-results/#comments Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:31:42 +0000 admin http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/?p=90 Google added snapshot thumbnail page previews in search results, at "Show options>Standard results". This is a great feature for people using search results and also for webmasters working on improving the way content of their pages are viewed by Googlebot. The thumbnail previews show at a quick glance to webmasters which parts of a page are not visible to Googlebot for various reasons, for example embedded images blocked by the robots.txt file or JavaScript components of a page.

Another new feature in "Show options>Standard results" of Google search results is ‘Images from the page’ that shows a selection of thumbnail images embedded in a page.

]]> http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/12/03/google-adds-thumbnail-page-previews-to-search-results/feed/ 0 Google Webmaster Tools adds fetch-as-Googlebot and malware details http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/10/13/google-webmaster-tools-adds-fetch-as-googlebot-and-malware-details/ http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/10/13/google-webmaster-tools-adds-fetch-as-googlebot-and-malware-details/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:52:14 +0000 admin http://asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/?p=81 Google Webmaster Tools added two new features: fetch as Googlebot that shows how Googlebot sees a page, and malware details to show malware code in infected websites. The two features are in the new Labs tab of Google Webmaster Tools.
Google presents the new features in the article Fetch as Googlebot and malware details of the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, and the malware details feature is discussed in detail in the article Show me the malware of the Google Online Security Blog.

]]> http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/10/13/google-webmaster-tools-adds-fetch-as-googlebot-and-malware-details/feed/ 0 Google announces proposal to crawl AJAX-based websites http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/10/07/google-proposal-to-crawl-ajax/ http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/10/07/google-proposal-to-crawl-ajax/#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:45:02 +0000 admin http://asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/?p=76 Google announced a proposal to crawl AJAX-based website in the article A proposal for making AJAX crawlable of the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. One of the ways of making an AJAX-based website crawlable is for the site to adapt the way it marks the links with fragment identifiers, and to use server-side headless browser techniques to generate HTML code based on the final state in the browser.

]]> http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/10/07/google-proposal-to-crawl-ajax/feed/ 0 specifying an image license with RDFa for Google Image Search http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/18/specifying-image-license-for-google-image-search/ http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/18/specifying-image-license-for-google-image-search/#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 19:54:02 +0000 admin http://asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/?p=66

Google recently announced in their Official Webmaster Central blog that they added to Google Image Search support for RDFa mark-up indicating the type of license for an image embedded in an HTML page (it applies only to the images owned by the site using the mark-up). The mark-up wraps around the image to make clear which license type for reuse refers to which image. The example given in the blog article is

<div about="image.jpg">
<img src="image.jpg" />
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/example">Creative Commons Attribution example</a>
</div>

The new micro-format attributes for labelling the type of usage rights for reuse are the about attribute of the div element enclosing the image and the hyperlink describing the type of license, and the rel="license" attribute of the hyperlink.

The Google blog article contains this YouTube video presentation by Peter Linsley.

You need Flash player 8+ and JavaScript enabled to view this video

]]> http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/18/specifying-image-license-for-google-image-search/feed/ 0 new infrastructure for Google’s search engine http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/13/new-infrastructure-for-google-search-engine/ http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/13/new-infrastructure-for-google-search-engine/#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:04:10 +0000 admin http://asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/?p=59 Google announced in their Official Google Webmaster Central Blog a “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search”, faster, even better than the present search engine. For now they are inviting people to use a generic, sandbox version at www2.sandbox.google.com and send feedback.

]]> http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/13/new-infrastructure-for-google-search-engine/feed/ 0 time – an important SEO parameter http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/08/time-an-important-seo-parameter/ http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/08/time-an-important-seo-parameter/#comments Sat, 08 Aug 2009 12:43:37 +0000 admin http://asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/?p=54 Mystery solved, the home page URL www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk appears now with title and snippet in Google search results for a search using the site: operator. I was right I think, it was a problem of time. It takes time to search engines to update in search results data that took a long time to build up. Time and waiting a bit are important tools in the art of SEO.

]]> http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/08/time-an-important-seo-parameter/feed/ 0 the SEO mystery of the home page URL http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/03/seo-mystery/ http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/03/seo-mystery/#comments Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:43:07 +0000 admin http://asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/?p=48 I have a theory that the hugely complex databases of search engines, like Google and Yahoo, are structured in layers, the deeper layers having more inertia in search results. This would explain the mystery of how my home page URL http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/ appears in search results. At a search using the site: search operator in Google, or at a search for the site name, the home page URL appears in search results like a URL blocked by the robots.txt file, with only the URL, no title or snippet. While at a search for actual words (just in case some people might do a search for actual words…), like “visualize the World Wide Web as a topological space with sheaves-like structures”, my home page appears nice and bright, with title and snippet. I blocked this URL to search engines for some time with the robots.txt file, while my main site URL was asymptoticdesign.com. Recently I decided to switch, to make asympoticdesign.co.uk my main URL, I redirected HTTP status 301 asymptoticdesign.com to asymptoticdesign.co.uk, and changed the robots.txt file to allow search engines to access and index the new site. I submitted an XML sitemap with the new URL to Google, in Google Webmaster Tools, that was accepted OK, and the stats there show the URL as indexed in search results, and it is indexed for a search query for words included in the content, but not for a search using the site: operator or for the site name. (The site: operator restricts the search results to URLs from the specified site.)

I think that the site: operator search and a site name search are a bit special, and they might access the deeper latent layers of the database, where the “robots.txt-ed out” status has not been updated yet.

]]> http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/03/seo-mystery/feed/ 0 blogosophy http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/03/blogosophy/ http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/03/blogosophy/#comments Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:59:37 +0000 admin http://asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/?p=43 Blogs have a nifty way to add semantic structure with categories and tags. I was wondering how to label the category for my blog articles about blogs, about the SEO and web programming aspects of blogs, and I thought of inventing a witty word, “blogosophy”, a word based like the word “philosophy” on the Greek word for wisdom, σοφία (sophia). I made a Google search for it, thinking that soon only my website will turn up for this new word, and surprise… the word “blogosophy” already exists, it is a word as established as the blogosphere….

]]> http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/03/blogosophy/feed/ 0 blogs and SEO http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/03/blogs-and-seo/ http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/03/blogs-and-seo/#comments Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:35:12 +0000 admin http://asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/?p=34 Blogs are in theory very search-engine-friendly. They are the perfect format for adding new content often, and search engines like that. Also blogs have many built-in features and settings to make them easy to crawl and index by search engines.

Blogs have search-engine-visibility settings, for example the WordPress software adds or removes a noindex,nofollow meta tag to the HTML head element of blog pages according to this visibility setting. A noindex,nofollow meta tag makes a page invisible in search results, prevents search engines from adding a page to search results. But for that the page has to be accessible to search engines, not blocked in robots.txt file. If a URL is blocked in the robots.txt file, search engines do not access it, but the URL still appears in search results (only the URL, no title or snippet), if search results collected that URL from links or XML sitemaps.

Another feature important to search engines is the URL structure. Blogs software provide settings for that, for example in WordPress gives the option, in Settings>Permalinks, to have a user-friendly, search-engine-friendly URL structure, like http://sitename.com/blog/2009/08/03/post-title-excerpt/

The URLs of RSS feeds automatically generated by the blog software, that include recent posts, can be submitted to search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, as XML sitemaps, and added in Sitemap lines to the robots.txt file, to quickly let know search engines of the new URLs of the blog, and help with indexing in search results.

It is very important to have indexable URLs easy to find by search engines, but as important as that is to stop search engines from crawling and indexing duplicate content URLs, from presenting to search engines a quasi-infinite space of URLs. For example the search feature or category navigation generate URLs with similar content as the blog pages, and it is good practice to block these URLs in the robots.txt file.

]]> http://www.asymptoticdesign.co.uk/blog/2009/08/03/blogs-and-seo/feed/ 0