Search Engine Optimization

Google have given webmasters a strong indication that the speed of your website may become an organic ranking factor in 2010!

Heres what Googles Matt Cutts has to say on the issue:

Historically we havent used it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience and so its fair to say if youre a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus, or if you have an awfully slow site, maybe users dont want that as much.

Google already considers page load times as part of the AdWords quality score, so its a logical step for this to be included in organic listings too.

While its unlikely to have a huge impact on rankings (there are over 200 other factors) it would be a smart decision to prepare for its introduction ahead of time and get your site loading as fast as possible. Here are a couple of tools which can help you get started:

• Googles Page Speed Tool ” This is a firefox plugin from Google that enables you to see which areas of your site need improvement.
• WebPageTest.org ” Another speed tool which provides optimization recommendations and other interesting stats.

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In an urge to come up with something new everytime, Google team will now be sending the updates about new versions of software packages and plugins to webmasters…

…through a message via Webmaster Tools. At times webmasters are not able to keep a check on the newer software versions coming up in market. The effort by Google team will certainly help them in taking a decision if they want to upgrade to the higher version or not.

The official Google Webmaster blog  is talking about the ways on how to identify the sites that can be notified to the webmasters. One of the best methods is parsing the source code of web pages that would be crawled by Google team. Suppose, WordPress and the other CMS applications have a generator meta tag that would specify the version of the number. This will prove to be helpful for the team to notify webmasters about the up-gradations. If you are a software developer and want the Google team to notify your users about new software versions, include a generator meta tag for telling the version number of your software.

The team received divided opinions about the new application because it might let the worm writers and hackers know that the site is vulnerable to which particular exploit type. Matt Mullenweg has discussed the ways to keep WordPress secure in his September blogpost on the WordPress site. But the advantage of the version number is that site owners will get alert about when to update their site easily.

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