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What is noindex, and when to use it

June 9, 2014 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

“noindex” is a simple setting you can activate for any page on your site that instructs search engines not to scan it.

Using WordPress you’ll usually find this on each page and post in the Dashboard, in the settings for whichever SEO Plugin you use (All In One SEO pack, Yoast, etc.).

Most other content management systems will have their own setting, or if your site is totally bespoke you can add this to the code in the <head> section:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow” />

Why would you want search engines to ignore a page when they come to index your site?

There are many reasons actually, but the most common is duplicate content. If you have two pages on your site that have similar content, you want to mark one as noindex so it doesn’t appear as though you’ve stuffed your site with multiple copies of the same thing.

Google and the other major engines see duplicate content as an attempt to make your site look fuller than it really is, or to have stolen content from elsewhere to try to fill your site up quickly, without much thought, and very little originality.

The other time to definitely use nofollow is if you have used a significant portion of content from another site. Sometimes there is a legitimate reason to grab content from elsewhere and publish it yourself, but you should always stop it from being indexed.

Now, before you get too excited and think “I’m fine, I’ve not got anything on my site that exists elsewhere at all”, let me ask you about your Terms and Conditions. Did you have those written from scratch? Or are they standardised, lifted from another site, or based on a template?

noindex them. Even though they’re just the legal bits, you don’t want Google to have any reason to think your site has a predilection toward duplicate content.

Google authorship in the code

September 19, 2013 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney 1 Comment

It goes without saying that we love Google Authorship, and the snippets produced by having it set up.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s all you need to know in one photo:

Having this set up grabs peoples’ attention.

Part of the process of setting these up is to have a link on your pages back to your Google Plus profile. All the guidance from Google, and therefore most online sources, is to have an icon or short piece of text that links to your profile.

Not everyone wants to link to their Google+ page. And for good reason; a lot of website authors only have G+ accounts for the sake of getting these authorship snippets working. They certainly don’t want to drive visitors to a social profile they aren’t actively using.

Here’s a solution I worked out myself. As far as I know, I’m the first to be publishing this.

Simply drop this code into your website, anywhere at all. It doesn’t display anything on the site—it just sits in the code, but works 100% as a Google Author link.

<a href=”your-profile-url?rel=author” />

So for example mine is:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/u/1/110002801838494280534?rel=author” />

It’s that simple!

Search Engine Optimisation, primer complete

June 10, 2013 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

On Friday I published part five of my five part primer series on search engine optimisation.

For your convenience, you can get to each piece of the SEO puzzle here:

The series will give you an understanding of SEO, how to approach it conceptually and practically, and contains some easy to replicate tips and tricks.

And if you need help with any of it, let me know.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Site speed

March 13, 2013 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

Google are very up-front about their using page load time as a metric for ranking pages and sites. Other search engines aren’t quite as open about why they rank websites the way they do, but there’s an excellent chance they measure it as well.

There are a lot of ways you can reduce the time it takes your pages to load, and as much as I’d love to produce one, this is not an exhaustive list.

Just as I did with the previous entry in this series, I’ll rely on bullet points to help keep this post useful.

1. Images.
Unsurprisingly, the smaller the file size of your images, the faster they load. As a rule of thumb, any image which is made up of text, line-drawings, or icons is best saved as a PNG. Photos, and realistic images are best saved as JPG.

There are all sorts of other bits of information kept in image files to, called “meta” data. Striping that out can be a great way to save a few kilobytes.

Yahoo Smush.it is a great free tool to help you with this process. I also recommend the use of professional graphic software like Adobe Photoshop, which will show you how various quality settings for images will affect the file size and visual quality.

2. Optimise your code.
You’d be surprised how many comments, or unnecessary tags get left in live code, be it HTML, PHP, Javascript, CSS, just about anything. Or sometimes code is just written by someone who didn’t realise there was one function available to do what they wrote in seven. Have someone else take a look at your code to see if you’ve missed something. Using include files, and lots of CSS, is a good way to keep from having to repeat yourself too.

There are other things like sticking your Javascript at the bottom of your pages if you can, not loading CSS selectors you don’t use, etc.

3. Minify your code.
Minify tools simply take out all that unnecessary stuff, your comments, line breaks you simply don’t need, and do all they can to serve as little information to the visitor as possible.

4. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
A CDN will store cached versions of your site at various data centres around the world. So when a visitor from New Zealand want to look at your site that’s located in the UK, it can get most of the files it needs from perhaps Australia, which appear to speed up your site.

There are lots of services to choose from, but for a start I recommend CloudFlare, not least because it’s free. Their guff claims it should half the load time of an average website. That’s a pretty big optimisation right there.

5. Cache
Caching is a key way to speed things up. If you can, use page caching on the server, and browser caching to make sure visitors hold on to local copies of your images, pdfs and other things that don’t change very often for as long as possible. I’ll be honest, making caching work for you is pretty technical, even WordPress plugins like W3 Total Cache aren’t for the feint-of-heart. Caching is really worth doing though, systems like Yahoo!’s yslow and Google’s pagespeed that are geared toward showing you ways to improve your site speed (and certainly in Google’s case, they use your pagespeed results when ranking your site) all have it in their “very important” recommendations. Most people will want professional help with this one though.

6. Power!
One of the easiest ways to speed up any site is to improve your server’s specifications. Adding more RAM, or more processing power nearly always shows a good improvement, and with modern day modular hosting many webhosts can up your specs for you for a few pounds a month. I added an extra 512MB of RAM to the server this site runs on, and it instantly loaded 145% faster. Easy.

There’s a lot else of course. Pre-loading content, different forms of caching, various web server add-ons etc., but if you start with the six listed above, you’ll be in good stead.

A word of caution: it’s all too easy to obsess over your site’s speed, because it’s a metric we can get results for really quickly, whereas regular SEO work can take weeks to affect your rankings. But keep your eye on the big picture, and remember, this is part of a larger goal, and absolutely nothing beats quality content in the SEO game.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Code

March 4, 2013 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney 2 Comments

There are a number of ways you want to improve your website’s code to help with SEO, and also to improve site speed which as I keep banging on about, is an important metric for Google.

This is probably the most technical of all the posts that make up my SEO primer, so by way of introduction, I’ll simply say the following are a variety of things within your site’s code that are helpful for optimisation. You may not be someone who ever touches your site’s code, but these are good things to know about so you can check your developer is doing their job right. 🙂

As much as I love spinning a good narrative, bullet points are going to be our friend in this piece.

Meta tags.
I’m getting these out of the way early, because they’re controversial. That’s because the way these are used is often misunderstood owing to historical changes. Basically, they used to be really important, and the first thing old-school search engines looked at. Then the spiders got more clever, and started to look to make sure your page’s text contained all the keywords you were using in the meta. Then they realised they could do away with the meta and just scan your text. For this reason, a lot of SEO (ahem) “experts” will tell you they’re not necessary. That’s bulls**t basically.
This page documents Google’s use of the “description” tag, which they do look at and use. Other search engines use them in varying ways too. The description and keyword (and author!) tags are all worth using, and using well. Make sure they tie-in with your copy.
Alt tags.
Search engines are certainly getting better at seeing what your site’s images are, but it’s far from perfect. Alt tags are the things that let the browser know what your image is representing, and therefore really important for SEO. I always make sure that my images contain tags that say not only what the image is of, but also the name of the page/entry it’s appearing in. That way the page name is repeated in the code too, which boosts it’s importance within the page.
nofollow.
About 10 years ago, people had things called doorway pages that were nothing but links to other pages in their sites. It was a dirty trick and got stamped all over by the search engine gods. However, you know how WordPress in particular creates pages for monthly archives, category archives, even tag archives? Well funnily enough they look a lot to spiders like doorway pages, containing tonnes of links (including all the sidebar links) to pages that just link to other pages en masse. I’ve measured this myself, and yes, you will get penalised for them. I have most of my links on this site set up with the nofollow rule, meaning the good search engines (technically spiders don’t have to respect this rule, but the big boys all do) will not follow it and count it as a link.
I want them to see all my pages, but not to see them all a hundred times. I opt to leave category links being followed, but NOT monthly archives or tags.
minify.
This is just a trick to get all the unnecessary spaces and characters out of your code. It’s particularly useful for javascript and CSS, but your output HTML is worth shrinking too. There are tools out there that do it at load time, but that can place a burden on your server. I love this tool which takes all your CSS and merges parts where it can, and will (if you ask it to) minify the hell out of it.
If you keep the page load time down, Google will rank you up.
Javascript at the bottom.
Place all the Javascript you can at the bottom of your page’s code. Again, it’s a speed thing.
Make it clean.
Don’t use tables unless it’s for, you know, a table. CSS has reigned supreme for a long time now. Don’t repeat attributes within tags. Check for redundant code. Consider taking out all those comments you put in while you were coding the site in the first place. Basically, give your code a nice, long bath.

Technically, your code underpins everything. Make it Search Engine Optimisation friendly and you’ll be much better ranked for it.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), a primer

February 18, 2013 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

I’m starting a series on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to help explain a few key concepts, as well as helping guide you towards the right SEO expert. Ideally me of course, but whoever is telling you they’re an expert really should know how to cover more than the basics.

The number of people I see selling SEO services who really have no idea is appalling. (I’d say shocking, but there are a lot of opportunists out there!)

I’m going to break my series of SEO posts into the following sections:

Code
Site Speed
Social integration
Blogging
Back-links and all other things link oriented

Naturally there is a lot of cross-over between them, but over the course of the series you’ll get a better idea of some key concepts, and some fairly original (but proven) ideas for their implementation.

All of course to get you more quality visitors!

10 Youtube URL tricks worth knowing

December 5, 2012 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

So often when I’m embedding a Youtube clip on a website for a client, I’m asked to customise it somehow. Now there are a variety of ways this can be done, from removing the “related videos” at the end (which I always do for schools, at the American School in London we must have done this a hundred times a month!) to overlaying images on top of the video entirely, (see danielwagner.com for an example).

But like so many things online, as long as you know the basics yourself, there’s a lot you can do with those.

Just adding little bits of code to the Youtube URL for example can have a big effect.

Example:

4. Hide the search box
The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

Here’s a great list of 10 tricks worth knowing.

Speeding up your site

October 30, 2012 by Peter Warwick-Mahoney Leave a Comment

There is a slew of methods to speed your site up–which is not only the polite thing to do for your guests–but helps with Speed Engine Optimisation (SEO) too. Google in particular looks at how quickly your site loads when deciding how to rank your site.

Now, if you’re familiar with web servers then everythign you need to know is written below. If not, this is the sort of thing you want to have an expert do for you; a faster site is too good an opportunity to pass up.

Browser caching is a process whereby we’re able to reduce the number of HTTP requests the server needs to process, which reduced page load times. Your server tells the visitor’s browser not to look for certain filkes everytime–usually the file that don’t change often anyway.

Edit your .htaccess file for your site, and include this code:

## EXPIRES CACHING ## # by Peter Mahoney of peterwm.com <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year" ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year" ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month" ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month" ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month" ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month" ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year" ExpiresDefault "access 2 days" </IfModule> ## EXPIRES CACHING ##

Restart your web server, and you’re done!

Cache that, baby.