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April 4th marks the end of another “original” search engine – AllTheWeb.com. Yahoo will close the search engine on April 4 saying that they will “focus on other features to improve your search experience.” Farewell ATW – you were one of my favorites back in the day.
AllTheWeb started out as Fast Search.
AllTheWeb - 7/16/91 - 4/4/11
Here are some of my favorite Google hoaxes from April Fool’s. Click the picture to be taken to Google’s April Fool’s day hoax page.
Google Blimp Ads
A workout program for your fingers.
A job posting seeking someone to fill in auto-complete data in Google's search box
Voicealyzer stops you from drunk-dialing
Google Docs Motion lets you spell words with your body
Google Gmail Motion lets you control Gmail through gestures
Google Cow lets you see inside the cow
Google Friendship - QUICKLY slapped with an "april fool" stamp
The Chrome Light extension turns Chrome to a text-based browser
Want a quick way to get your site banned? Go with a company that advertises their link-spamming scam publicly. Companies like this are poison for your site:
Link spammer ad on Facebook
Compressed code is good for browsers and search engines. Code compression is when all the line breaks that make it readable by humans are removed to make it parse faster for browsers and search engine robots. Several of my clients use code compression to help their pages load faster. Unfortunately, the clients I have that use this technique don’t allow outside HTML access. Basically, the only code I get to see is the compressed code which makes working with it a total eye-burner. All the pain is over though because I found a couple of tools today that decompress the code for me to make it manageable! I found a CSS Decompressor and I found an HTML Decompressor too. I’m thrilled!
 This is how compressed CSS looks. It's a total pain to diagnose. |
 This is what the decompressor tool puts out. Much more manageable! |
Did you know that you are required to notify your users that you are using Google Analytics via your privacy policy? If not, you do now. If you haven’t updated your privacy policy to reflect this, you are in violation of the Google Analytics Terms of Service! According to paragraph seven in the Google Analytics Terms of Service;
“You must post a privacy policy and that policy must provide notice of your use of a cookie that collects anonymous traffic data.”
Well, what are you waiting for? Get to it!
Today on Webmasterworld there was a discussion about Google showing fewer than 10 organic results for certain searches. I did some checking and was able to see that in fact Google is showing fewer than ten results. It looks like Google is experimenting with displaying other resources they think people may be interested in for certain searches. At the time I checked, most “commercial” terms were unaffected. However, if you were the number 10, or in some cases the number 9 result in the organic listings you may see your site dropped to page two which would have a huge impact on your traffic. Numbers 9 and 10 don’t get a lot of traffic, but page two gets next to none. If you had enough listings at the bottom of the first page that got dropped, you’d see a significant drop in traffic. Every time I’ve seen Google experiment with adding things to the results, it eventually sticks.
Page 1 just got more competitive!
 A search for the band "The Killers" produces 9 organic results. (click the image for a larger view) |
 A search for the band called The Shins produces 8 organic results. (click the image for a larger view) |
I installed IE just a few moments ago and was using it to create this post, however, I had to finish it with Chrome because IE9 got confused about inserting images.
Microsoft blatantly copied the look of Chrome and some of the features like the fact that each tab is an isolated individual process. Overall the browser seems pretty good but be sure to check your own website to make sure that it works correctly in IE9 as a couple of my client’s sites do not. One thing I find lacking is the fact that IE9 doesn’t underline misspelled words in red. I also don’t like how crammed the tabs get since they are located directly to the right of the address bar.
One surprising thing is the fact that when I ran the Acid3 test to check IE9 and it consistently scored a 95/100. I thought Microsoft made huge efforts to make the browser standards compliant! I thought the results must be wrong so I refreshed a few times and received the same score. I was pretty sure I remembered other browsers doing better so I checked a few. Chrome, Opera and Safari got 100/100 and Firefox got 97/100.
Finally, the big test. Benchmarking. I used FutureMark’s Pacekeeper for the tests. I was surprised that out of the five browsers I tested on my computer, IE9 came in third. My machine is a Quad Core Intel Q6600 running Windows 7 64 bit with 8 gigs of RAM.
Benchmarks run on five browsers.
In true Internet Explorer fashion, IE9 just doesn’t live up to the hype.
I am happy to announce that I’ve been selected to speak again at the 2011 Las Vegas Pubcon Conference. It’s a huge honor to be chosen out of the hundreds of applicants and I am really looking forward to speaking at this event.
I recently spoke at Pubcon Austin and think it went pretty well. I talked to around 45 people about the fundamentals of SEO, a topic that I think is very important and often overlooked. Everyone is all about the latest and greatest SEO techniques and so many fail to complete an initial assessment and optimization of a website. You can view a pdf of my presentation here: SEOMike Pubcon South Expert Spotlight.
I learned a ton from the sessions at the conference and one of the best presentations, as always, was by my friend Rob Snell. The man is a genius. I highly recommend you check out his presentation and transcript which you can find here: Rob Snell’s Pubcon Presentation on “Bottom to Top SEO of an Ecommerce Site“
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be featured in an Expert Spotlight at Pubcon South in Austin on March 8th. I’ll be speaking about “SEO Entry Level – Rock Solid Basics” on March 8th. I’m pretty excited to let people in on some of the thing I’ve learned over the years.
