(7/22 Update on SSL at the bottom) I was very interested to read this article by Gene McKenna from Groupon that was posted to Search Engine Land last week, as were a lot of people. This article says that when Groupon de-indexed themselves from Google that 60% of their direct traffic to long URLs (i.e. […]
Update 8/7/2014: Google has now announced HTTPS is a ranking factor! Only a month after my original article below! Does that mean that the “not yet” I describe below has now happened and you’re missing out if you don’t switch?? No, not really. The advice below is still valid and the weight of this ranking factor […]
After reading this article looking for a clear provable case of negative SEO from Rand Fishkin from Moz.com this week I’ve been thinking about negative SEO, what people really mean by it, and my own run-ins with it. Does Negative SEO even exist? My opinion (which I think is a pretty common one) is that […]
I love WordPress, but one of the biggest pains has always been keeping it up-to-date and secure when you’ve got more than one or two installs. If you’ve got only a couple installs then just manually logging into each one and doing updates and making sure you haven’t broken anything isn’t too bad. As soon […]
For me, one of the most rewarding things in systems architecture is taking something that is slow and laggy and making it way faster. Seeing an HTML call drop from 800ms to 200ms is probably a lot more exciting than really it should be. But there’s real danger in just “optimizing everything” without real knowledge […]
When creating and launching a new site, the question of whether to use a CDN (content delivery network) and which one to use will inevitably come up. So we’re going to try and identify the different ways in which a CDN can be used, and when you really need one. What is a CDN? We’re […]
One question we all always get asked is, “how do I speed up my site?” Unless you don’t have anything on your pages there’s always more you can do to speed it up, the question is how fast your site is now and how much time & effort to spend improving that. Before trying to […]
If you’re dealing with a high traffic site or doing reports in Google Analytics over long periods of time you may have run into report sampling. Y’know, the yellow box: To me there’s 3 obvious questions when you see it: 1. Why is it happening? 2. What can I do about it? 3. Is it […]
One common Google Analytics issue we see a lot are issues with cross-domain tracking, especially for cases of subdomains. Say you have www.yrdomain.com and blog.yrdomain.com but you want to keep track of sessions under the same Analytics property for both. The Google Analytics docs are pretty good in this case, but they lay out a […]
