I recently noticed that my WordPress blog’s page loading times increased through the roofs which made me reevaluate everything that contributed to the loading times of the website. I implemented a few changes on the blog to improve page loading times. I first got rid of the three social networking buttons pointing to Google Plus, [...]

Categories: Web Development

The rise of smartphones and other mobile handheld devices has increased the importance of optimizing websites for smartphones and other mobile devices. There are three core aspects that need to be taken into consideration. The size of the display which is often a lot smaller than standard desktop display resolutions, the technologies supported by those [...]

Categories: Online Services, Web Development

I have only a good dozen websites listed under my Google account in Webmaster Tools. In case you do not know what that is, it is a service for webmaster to verify domain ownership to get additional information about the status of each website added in the Google search engine. You can manage crawl rates, [...]

Categories: Google

So called scraper sites or scrapers are one of the dark phenomenons of the Internet. The sites basically republish the RSS feed of one or multiple unique websites on a domain, usually without rights or link back to the original source. Technology in this sector has advanced in past years, and scraping has been combined [...]

Categories: Web Development

Maybe you have spotted one of the recent changes on Google search results pages already. Some website listings, Lifehacker’s for instance, display an author profile photo next to their listing in the Google search results. This only happens on pages where a single author can be easily identified, which is the case for most blog [...]

Categories: Web Development

So called sitelinks are displayed if a specific search term has an authority site associated with it. If you search for Ghacks for instance, you will notice that my site is displayed at the top. Below the standard listing are the site links, which previously used about the same amount of space as a standard [...]

Categories: Google, Search Engines, Web Development

Creating a new website can be a very rewarding process. Webmasters usually run into a phase shortly after they have setup the site where they have to wait until the site gets indexed in the big search engines. This can take minutes, hours, days and sometimes even weeks, as it depends on the search engine [...]

Categories: Google, Web Development

Google just announced the availability of the webmaster related service Page Speed Service. You may remember that the company started to introduce its Page Speed service about two years ago which provided suggestions to webmasters and developers on how to improve the page loading times of their websites and web services. The Page Speed Service [...]

Categories: Web Development

Google is making a lot of changes lately which can partially be attributed to the rising criticism that search quality has taken the dive in recent years. The aim of the latest change that has been rolled out yesterday in the US is to move “more” quality sites to the top of the search results, [...]

Categories: Google, Search Engines