Las Vegas Web Design Blog | The Web Squad

Google has been playing with the idea of making site speed a ranking factor for a while now. It started with the release of Google Caffeine in a sandbox for web developers and SEO’s to see how queries will be affected. Google says that Caffeine will allow Google to index sites faster and provide better results.

In a recent interview will Matt Cutts, he said that Caffeine will go live on one data center sometime before the holidays, and will be in the normal rotation. He also said that Caffeine will not go live on other data centers until sometime after the holidays to avoid upsetting webmasters as with the infamous Florida update back in 2003.

Cutts said that search engine rankings will not be as drastically affected as people think. He said that Caffeine is aimed toward making the web a better place for the average user and giving them the best experience possible.

However, the web development and SEO industry is split about how they feel about Caffeine. While some are praising the update, other are outraged and some are saying that they will abandon Google all together.The argument is should speed really count. Webmasters who have retail sites that are rather large and have a lot of custom coding and high quality images are saying no because they think that a poorer quality site will beat them out just because they load faster.

The counter argument is that connection speeds today are reaching excess of 100mb/s and there is no reason that any site should take more than 15 seconds to load. Back in the days of dial-up and slow DSL speeds, webmasters could get away with having a slow site because people were more patient then.

It is no doubt that Caffeine will add just another twist to the SEO and web development industry, but that is what the industry is based on. The web is always changing and those who are able to adapt will benefit.

About Thursday of last week, Google removed PageRank from its Web Masters tools. This comes after several years of subtle hints that PageRank is not as important as people may think. It has been published on their site for some time stating that PageRank is just one of 200 factors that Google looks at for ranking sites in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). SEO gurus have known this for a while as well and all but stopped caring about the little green bar in the Google toolbar. However, Google did not say whether or not if they will completely eliminate PR and take it out of the toolbar. Many industry experts say that PageRank is still important to the industry as it can tell you how your website is doing in Google, almost as a health indicator. Also, it is important from a marketing point of view as well as Titus Hoskins explains.

Regardless of what Google wants to happen, PageRank is still extremely important to anyone marketing on the web, especially if you’re selling SEO services or operating a web business. Try selling SEO services when that little green bar on your site is pointing to PR0 or worst yet, pointing to a solid gray bar.Obtaining a high PR7 or PR8 simply means more business and revenues… regardless of how Google is or is not using PageRank. People know how to count and they learned long ago, a ten is a lot more than a big fat zero.

We are still waiting to hear more about Google’s ultimate decision about how it is going to handle PageRank from now on. What ever the case may be, this is a prime example of how the SEO field is ever changing.

For all of you open-source web developers, Joomla! 1.6 Alpha 2 was just released and Beta is soon to follow. However, 1.6 Alpha 2 is not stable and should be used by developers and hobbyists. It is more meant to be a teaser for 1.6 Beta so that developers can start to understand the differences between 1.6 and 1.5.
With a list of new improvements already implemented and some more promised for 1.6 Beta, developers should be extremely happy with the upgrade. A full list is available on the Joomla! Developers website.

An era of the web has officially ended as Yahoo shuts down its popular service GeoCities. The announcement, which came from Yahoo back in April, took the whole community by surprise. Even with the looming closure GeoCities saw 10 million unique visitors a month up to September.

Yahoo’s reason for shutting down the popular service is simply that it is not one of their priorities. Yahoo has, in fact, shut roughly 20 percent of its services in the past year. This shutdown of many of its services raises suspicions about the financial stability of Yahoo, especially now since Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is proving to be as big power player in the search engine world.

Then there’s the fact that Google, not Yahoo, appears to be responsible for the lion’s share of GeoCities referrals, sending about 31.45 percent of the site’s traffic its way,” noted Doug Caverly upon Yahoo’s original announcement. “Yahoo’s only behind of 16.89 percent of all GeoCities visits. So by closing GeoCities, for which it paid $3.6 billion in 1999, Yahoo seems to be turning its back on a large amount of traffic. Moreover, it’s turning down free traffic from its biggest competitor.

The strategic factor of the shutdown could, again, be in large part to Bing’s rapid success. Let’s just hope that is all this is, a strategic move to increase traffic, and nothing more serious, like a sign of financial trouble.

In the past couple of weeks we have acquired 6 new clients! Everything from Southern Nevada Legal Services, to TI construction. A complete list will be available as their sites go live.

It has been long known in the SEO world that meta tags were no longer needed because Google did not read them anymore. Google stopped reading them because some websites abused them by using non-relevant tags to boost their site. However, many web developers have continued to place them on websites to help optimize for other search engines, and to make customers happy. On Monday, Google reaffirmed to the public that meta tags will not help boost a site’s rankings in its search engine. However, this may not spell the end for this little bits of coding.

Microsoft said that its search engine, Bing, still utilizes the tag. This could mean a revival for meta tags if Bing proves to become a driving force in the search engine world. Microsoft’s search engine partner, Yahoo, has not confirmed nor denied that they utilize meta tags.

Learn more about how search engine optimization can help your website or business visit The Web Squad

search engine optimization, seo, meta tags, google, bing