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Google’s fascination at making the web faster stretches on to the Webmaster Tools via Site Performance analytics feature. Site Performance which is currently under Webmaster Tools Labs provides you with various information that indicates how fast your site loads from the user’s end. Site Performance gives you the average page load time of the different pages comprising your websites or blogs. It also provides you with appropriate suggestions that you can do to improve problem areas of your sites loading performance. Google collects your site’s performance data from users who are using Google Toolbar and have enabled PageRank feature. Site Performance is a pretty cool feature of Webmaster Tools. It’s quite interesting to see how your websites and blog design affects your site’s performance. For instance, if you’re using a generic WordPress template, Site Performance can tell you whether multiple Javascripts and CSS templates are actually affecting your site loading time. You may also install the Page Speed Browser-On from your Webmaster Tools account. This browser add-on will help you evaluate the performance of your pages as well as suggestion on how to improve them. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Adds Site Performance Feature to Webmaster
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browser,
from-the-user,
pages-as-well,
search engine news,
the-performance,
user,
webmaster,
webmaster-tools
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As the holiday season is rolling in, ecommerce websites are going full force at their SEO, which inevitably includes HTTP/HTTPS pages which need to be optimized in a proper way. I approached Matt Cutts with this question on Twitter and got a very simple answer: Yet, there’s virtually no information anywhere that helps understand the potential challenges for HTTP/HTTPS optimization. Based on my observations and technical knowledge, here’s the top things to watch out for when you are optimizing HTTP/HTTPs – and resolutions for each. 1. Duplicate Content and
Tags:
browser,
holiday,
https,
maria-nikishyna,
pages,
search,
search-engine,
tools,
webmaster,
webmaster-tools
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So you appear to do everything right: you have a fair amount of unique content and you seem to update your site regularly and Google seems to often visit your site… but there appear to be much fewer links in Google’s index than there are actually on your site. So what may that mean? 1. Are there really few pages in Google’s index? You might be wrong about how many URLs are actually in the index as there appears to be no definitive way to tell this. SITE: command may be inaccurate and Google Webmaster Tools reports may be unreliable. ! To make sure a URL isn’t really indexed, use your traffic analytics tool to see if there are no Google search referrals to this page. If the page is ranked, there should be nothing wrong with it. 2. Evaluate your content quality Google may keep visiting but failing to find pages useful enough to store them in the index. By “useful” content I mean unique text content longer than one or two sentences. 3. This may be just seasonal / temporal We’ve discussed this before and here’s a helpful forum thread about that: during some (”busy”) periods of the year Google may hold off indexing new URLs: …the “holiday search results” you know. While Google is in this mode (at least what we’ve seen in the past) the basic spidering, especially for young websites, continues but their indexing is often in a holding pattern. 4. Your site is too young: wait a bit Google treats new sites with suspicion. It doesn’t want to store data of the sites it doesn’t trust (or it may be storing the URLs already but not telling you to watch the trend). So just keep adding quality and relax. 5. Check for some stupid mistakes I’ve seen quite a few people coming to me for SEO diagnostics complaining of bad indexing rate and having Noindex meta tag all over the place. Conclusions? Looking back at the post, I can’t help noticing that there’s only one “true” issue listed (the content quality) – 2 of five points describe a perfectly normal situation and one is about improper diagnostics. So is bad indexing really not an issue most of the time? Sadly, it is often an issue. But to diagnose it, you’ll need more information: like cache rate of your site pages, possible Webmaster Tools errors, low rankings, etc. Like I said, the indexing rate is too hard to diagnose to signal of anything… Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Your Site Is Badly Indexed? What Can This
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content,
over-the-place,
search-engine,
seo,
time,
tools,
traffic,
watch-the-trend,
webmaster-tools
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SITE: operator is one of my favorite advanced Google search commands. It has always been a good way to tell how many URLs (approximately) are in Google’s index, to diagnose some on-site SEO issue as well as identify a penalty . There have been more and more people recently who are complaining about how inaccurate SITE: command actually is. People report either sudden drop in the number of results returned for site:domain.com command (with no change reported in Google Webmaster Tools) or inconsistent data (again, compared to verified Webmaster Tools account data). Here’s what smart people say about this: There are a growing number of people noticing the strange results from the site: operator. Bottom line for me, this report cannot be trusted any longer – most especially not the number. Just because a url is not in the site: operator result doesn’t mean it isn’t indexed and getting search traffic. However, while agreeing to the command being largely inaccurate, people still see the effect on actual site rankings: Anyhow, while I found “site:” to be maybe 65% reliable (I’ll expand on this) I still find the correlation (between the ’site’ number and SERP traffic) to be fairly significant. This forum discussion suggests the need of checking throughout a number of Google data centers before driving to any conclusions: I think the datacenters hold all the data and that data gets filtered down to regular google. Google knows all the pages are there, it just chooses which pages are deemed more important. This has always bugged me in the past until I noticed that a lot of unique phrase searches will show a page that is not part of the 1950 that the site operator returns. So, let’s share our experience? Here are a few tools that will help you to check SITE: results for any of your sites to compare to regular Google: WebRankInfo Data Centers Tool (17 Google data centers at once); SEOchat “Multiple Datacenters Search” (12 data centers at once, 3 ranges of data centers are available); LinksAndTraffic Datacenters Search (10 Google data centers at once); IWebTool Google Data Center Search (10 Google data centers at once, 4 ranges of data centers are available). Please check your site and share your numbers in the comments (if you have Google Webmaster Tools data, please share it as well). Numbers for [site:SearchEngineJournal.com]: Regular Google: 22, 600 (for November, 3) Datacenters: range from 9,980 (!) to 23, 100 What about you? Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . How Inaccurate Google’s SITE: Operator Is and How to Fix
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center-search,
centers-at-once,
correlation,
data,
data-centers,
datacenters,
numbers,
operator,
regular-google,
search-engine,
seo,
tools,
webmaster-tools