Google announced this week that the speed of a page is now being considered as part of how they rank pages on a web site.  This has some people happy, others scrambling.

There are a couple of things which need to be considered with this news.

• Google uses over 200 factors to “grade” a site, determining where it should be placed in the search engine rankings. Adding 1 additional factor, unless it is a large factor should have little effect on the search results.
• “All things being equal I would prefer to visit a fast loading site versus a slow one when I search for something” – the question is, what are the odds that all things are equal. They aren’t – so good, relevant content and links are still more important.
• Google launched the update a couple of weeks before the announcement. – And no one really noticed! This means that either, A) It’s not that big of a factor, or B) users had already identified the preferred site, and took the speed into effect, and helped Google rank the page by links, and content.

Does this mean you shouldn’t worry about a site speed – of course not, but it does mean you shouldn’t worry about it. It also means it’s something to consider, as Google, as well as many other companies, have seen that “that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there”. (source)

Popularity: 2% [?]

I don’t know about you, but I’m always a bit paranoid with how much information is out there about me. Whether it comes from Credit Card receipts, or data stored on other people’s servers.

Whether it is your information, or your customer’s, you should always mindful of how personal information is being used. This is the idea behind Data Privacy Day (http://dataprivacyday2010.org/).

Personal identifiable information (PII) while necessary to have in many businesses needs to be handled with care. Consider the following steps when working with your clients (and make sure the companies you work with have similar practices).

• Limit access of PII to only necessary individuals
• Destroy PII documents after they are no longer needed for business or by law. (cross cut shredders, and secure deletion from the computer)
• As a minimum format the hard drives of computers removed from service. (My mother works for a school which has computers donated periodically – you would be surprised what they find when the clean them up before they install them.)
• Perform a security audit to see if any PII is located on unauthorized computers, then close the security holes. (http://www.dbdatafinder.com/ is a link for an application which searches for Social Security Numbers and Credit Card Numbers in all different types of files)
• Come up with a good password requirements guidelines for yourself and your business. (more on this later)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Firefox turns five today. For some, they remember what the Web was like in 2004 – Internet Explorer 6 was the dominant browser, and had not been updates in 3 years, web technology was stagnating because of it.

Now, browsers are faster, and doing more – new standards are coming out (HTML5, CSS3, AJAX libraries, and more) – and while the techno-babble means little to many, it also means everything.  It means websites that can do more, and do it faster.

It has also heralded other browsers becoming more popular.  Five years ago, there was no Chrome or Safari, now web surfers have options to surf the web – and the web is getting better because of it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Firefox keeps Microsoft ‘honest’ on 5th birthday (theregister.co.uk)
• Happy 5th Birthday, Firefox (mashable.com)
• Firefox: new version planned for December as browser celebrates fifth birthday (telegraph.co.uk)
• Happy Birthday: A Look Back at Five Years of Firefox [Mozilla Firefox] (lifehacker.com)
• With Firefox 3.6, Mozilla Aims to Speed up Web Browsing (readwriteweb.com)

Popularity: 4% [?]

I’ve seen numerous posts where people have claimed that good clean HTML leads to better SEO rankings. I’ve even talked about the lie that of the link between SEO and valid HTML.

I’ve yet to see any studies done which verify this claim and in fact I’ve even seen evidence to the opposite effect being true. I pointed out how in some competitive markets, the higher the ranking for the site the worse the validation recently in another post. This does not mean that poor code relates to higher rankings – just that valid HTML code doesn’t correlate to better rankings as some people would like to say, just like good clean code doesn’t mean the site will look better to visitors.

Matt Cutts recently did a short video on why Google’s own code doesn’t validate. (video opens new window – not allowed to embed)

Now does this mean that you should only have your web designers write invalid code – not, but it does mean you shouldn’t waste unnecessary time on it either.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Says Pages That Validate Do Not Get Ranking Boost (seroundtable.com)

Popularity: 4% [?]