Tim Harper | Blog
Tim Harper's personal blog, covering kiteboarding, Internet and SEO topics
Google’s site performance tool needs some more work.
Feb 3rd
I just read a nice intro to the new site performance tool (that is currently in labs) on seomoz by a guest blogger scotiasystems: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/optimizing-page-speed-for-ranking-using-google-tools And decided to check it out in webmaster tools:
The site performance tool looks as vague as all the other webmaster tools stats, but it does have some interesting data:
For one of my US hosted sites (Dedicated hosting on 1 server) I get:
Speed rating of between 0-20 On average, pages in your site take 3.5 seconds to load (updated on Jan 31, 2010). This is slower than 58% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (less than 100 data points). (Homepage size is 25.14 KB)
And for comparison a Kenyan hosted site (2 servers with double the hardware specs each AND a load balancer), I get the following stats: Speed rating of between 0-50 “On average, pages in your site take 9.6 seconds to load (updated on Jan 31, 2010). This is slower than 92% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (less than 100 data points). (Homepage size is only 6.88 KB – built for mobile)
So the site is really slow to google’s crawlers, but do they take into account that they may be crawling a page from half way around the world? I wouldn’t mind so much if I hosted on a server down the road from Mountain View California, but because this is Africa, I’m a little concerned.
Another issue I picked up is that google’s very own page ads and analytics scripts are picked up as possible solutions to increasing the speed in your page load times, as they suggest:
Minimize DNS lookups The domains of the following URLs only serve one resource each. If possible, avoid the extra DNS lookups by serving these resources from existing domains:
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js
http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js
So, make your pages faster by writing your own analytics and ad server, and try to be located close to us, thanks google, very helpful.
Ushahidi – Haiti earthquake response
Jan 14th
I’ve been following the progress of ushahidi for a while now, it’s a crowdsourcing platform for crisis information, and was first used in the post election violence in Kenya in 2007. Since then they have taken the platform from strength to strength, and have got some real exposure with the latest deployment covering the Haiti earthquake that happened yesterday. There’s a great blog post explaining what ushahidi has managed to do in an extremely short space of time here: http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/01/13/haiti-earthquake/
I take my hat off to the Ushahidi team for their efforts over the last 24hours, you have done a superb job at getting the platform up and running, and by the responses coming in to the system, I know that this project will make a real difference in the relief efforts.
http://haiti.ushahidi.com/ for more details and up to the minute reports from the island itself.
As a side note, it’s the first time I’ve seen google’s ‘Latest Results’ when doing a search for haiti earthquake in their results page. http://www.google.co.za/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=haiti+earthquake
It scrolls real time search results as they are indexed by google, fairly impressive I must say!!
Classic SEO quotes
Sep 7th
Avinash Kaushik Quotes that Belong on Hallmark Cards:
(Specifically related to Analytics)
7. Not segmenting data is a crime against humanity.
6. Never let your campaigns write checks that your website can’t cash.
5. I believe God created the internet so we could fail faster.
4. Magazine advertisements are faith based initiatives.
3. All data needs context, even server errors go up and to the right over time.
2. Bounce rate is brilliantly dumb. It shows that your customers came, they puked, they left.
1. Social media is like teen sex, everyone wants to do it. No one actually knows how. When finally done, there is surprise it’s not better.
Bing and Yahoo sitting in a tree…
Jul 30th
Bing and Yahoo sitting in a tree…
So what does it mean?
There’s a fairly lengthy explanation in terms of SEO here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-10-things-the-microsoftyahoo-deal-change-for-seo
But what it really comes down to is this:
There are now two main Search players, Bing vs Google, all others will probably either fall by the wayside or be eaten up by one or the other.
Google now has one, very specific opposition, and Microsoft are probably out to give google a very good run for their money.
How they stack up:
Google:
Currently have superior presence, both US and internationally, consumers see them as a household name. Their webmaster tools / analytics / adsense management is very well established and easy to integrate with each other.
Bing:
Not a household name yet, webmaster tools etc needs a lot of work, and they do not have even close to the volumes of Google. They do however have one of the worlds largest corporations behind them, with reaches into most major economic centers.
(check out micosoft locations vs google locations to get an idea of local offices)
http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/default.aspx
http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/locations.html
Microsoft has now acquired the search business of yahoo
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2009/tc20090728_826397.htm
So what does it mean?
There’s a fairly lengthy explanation in terms of SEO here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/top-10-things-the-microsoftyahoo-deal-change-for-seo
But what it really comes down to is this:
There are now two main Search players, Bing vs Google, all others will probably either fall by the wayside or be eaten up by one or the other.
Google now has one, very specific opposition, and Microsoft are probably out to give google a very good run for their money.
How they stack up in my opinion:
Google:
Currently have superior presence, both US and internationally, consumers see them as a household name. Their webmaster tools / analytics / adsense management is very well established and easy to integrate with each other.
Bing:
Not a household name yet, webmaster tools etc needs a lot of work, and they do not have even close to the volumes of Google. They do however have one of the worlds largest corporations behind them, with reaches into most major economic centers.
Check out microsoft locations vs google locations to get an idea of local offices:
http://www.microsoft.com/worldwide/default.aspx
http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/locations.html
So it will be interesting to see how things play out, the tried and trusted brand or the oversize bully that is able to place it’s product exactly where it wants it, in your face.
Google Adsense for Domains – an experiment.
Jul 3rd
So I decided to try a little experiment last night:
I added two google adsense for domains to my adsense account for the following two domains:
www.snapcracklepop.co.za
(Both are domains I registered for fun, and are purely placeholders for something I may do in the future)
Now it did take a while to configure in WHM as it involves being able to tweak your DNS and credit goes to Gary Illyes for his post at: http://devoracles.com/how-to-set-up-adsense-for-domains-on-cpanel-whm for his step by step guide. *Note that if you don’t have access to change your A records and cnames in DNS this is not going to work for you.
So now for the experiment, will google index these domains and show them as results in their listings? If they do I will be utterly dissapointed, as they are purely SPAM!! As all they are are pages with loads and loads of google ads! I can see why they would, because they are earning revenue from the ads, but as a google user I really don’t want to see them in my SERPS. (Thank you very much)
Now I will just have to wait and see whether they are indexed or not….
My Dentist is an e-marketing genius – or not.
Jun 24th
One of the most interesting industries making use of e-marketing in SA are our Dentists, and I’m proud to say that my dentist is one of them. He sends out email newsletters every 2-3 months, he has a fairly keyword packed website and even has a blog!! I also seem to remember staring up at a poster with his URL on it the last time I was sat in his dentist chair.
Why you ask? – well I definitely did, and it seems as though ‘Dentist’ is a very competitive keyword in sa, (see google trends for dentist). On top of that, almost all of the first page of SERP’s for “dentist” are directories or News related articles, and only one of them is an actual dentist (based in hillcrest of all places). Myteeth is around 22nd, before this post, and the other ‘real dentist sites’ only number 3 in the top 30 spots for the keyword Dentist.
So with all of this in mind I still wondered why the big mailing campaign and the attempt at some SEO keyword stuffing on the site, and after actually reading the site I figured out that it’s a sales pitch for something way more sinister than a trip to the friendly dentist for a checkup – Cosmetic Dentistry.
Myteeth.co.za has links all over the place to free reports, new client specials, and it’s all a cover for… getting veneers.
How Dissapointing.
I almost expect to find them right next to the free viagra ads in my spam mailbox some time in the future, whatever happened to the friendly neighbourhood dentist?
I also have some very broad SEO tips: get a few more cape town keywords on the homepage, get a geo.region and a geo.placename meta tag, this may help people searching for a keyword like cape town dentist.
I do however take my hat off to someone in an industry that isn’t traditionally very tech savvy for getting with the times and having something other than flyers in my windshield. I think there is still some work to be done on the SEO for his pages, I’m quite sure however that he may say the same about my teeth!.
Facebook /username and other URL’s
Jun 13th
Damnit, I missed out on /tim.harper, but at least I’m no 1:
http://www.facebook.com/tim.harper1
For the un-techy bunch, Facebook opened up their username urls today, so anybody can change from the old /id=83687248548356 url to the much friendlier one above.
I also have the following urls:
and:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/timothyharper
and I can be contacted on timharper27 <at> gmail dot com
not very consistent I know, but it’s a good job I got the http://www.timharper.co.za now isn’t it!!
More posts to follow!
Tim Harper
Tim Harper - cranking out a railey
Tim Harper - A shot while kiting.
