All these latest Google Search algorithm changes are making our visitor stats going wild both ways. The most important thing many webmasters forget to check after building a website is it’s loading speed. So many of them loading over 4 sec., even those with basic WordPress installation.
(try W3 Total Cache plugin).

I was dismissing Google algorithm changes at first, until I saw the stats for one of our websites; http://webimenik.biz to be exact. Website visits fell to over year and a half old averages. When I checked loading time it was obvious, WebImenik load time was over 5 sec. and first 3 was taken by CPU getting necessary data to show the front page.

So I’ve sat down and built Caching support which made our website faster by 50% and with few other tweaks like merging css files, minifying and compressing javascript it got to 60% improvement in speed. I could do it much more better but that requires too much time. Your visitors and Google will be thankful just with the basic tweaks (15min job), now get to work! ;)

Great online tool for checking website speed: http://tools.pingdom.com

There are many methods to make Ajax operations crawable by Google and other search engines. Many are still saying it’s not the right time yet to use Ajax for all dynamic content. I disagree! Google already introduced their method to make this work but it’s too complicated and needs a lot of additional programming time to make it work properly.

I on the other hand have a great idea that’s stupid simple, works for Googlebot and browsers with disabled Javascript. Isn’t that great!? :)
Even dough I came up with this idea myself, someone elase in the world had the same idea before me and it’s called Hijax. So what is Hijax in definition?

Hijax is combination of words Ajax and Hijack and that’s it’s core functionality. Hijax uses both Ajax and Javascript when available (to create those magical effects that Desktop apps had for decades). Hijax is using Javascript when available to hijack HTTP request (when website visitor makes a click on a link to another page) and enables Ajax magic to happen. But, when you open the page in a browser that doesn’t have Javascript enabled, the website functions as it should (without fancy effects that Ajax can provide), it opens the page with preloaded content. Hijax method is a great time and bandwidth saviour.

And finally the interesting part.
The example, dead simple:

<a href="page-2.html" onclick="AjaxCall('page-2'); return false;">

* Use this method on all links intended to work with Ajax calls.

That’s it! So simple! We are already using this method on our new company website that’s currently in development.

Google ChromeGoogle Krom, as we would say it on Croatian. It’s a new web browser from Google factory. There are many things I can say about it, lots of likes and dislikes so I’d rather wait a month or two for them to upgrade the product then saying anything smart here.

That’s all, just wanted to make a note :)

Google or google? We all ask ourself, maybe it’s something more, much bigger to come? Only time will tell. More or less, many people commented the new Google favicon as a bad change and I agree with that, but that’s only me! I see new Google favicon less recognizable, it doesn’t stand out on browser tabsĀ as before, it’s less Google in it – the big G and the colors, less visible for people with vision problems, invisible when scaled down and the list goes on. The only good change is the philosophy behind the small g, there are many theories out there.

New Google favicon