Reading Time: < 1 min For decades, there have been calls for Google to be more transparent about how their search algorithm works. While it’d be essentially impossible to share because it’s so wildly complex, even if sharing was possible it might still be a bad idea. In a recent Twitter poll, search engine experts were asked about the impact […]
Websites
The right way to forward URLs
Reading Time: < 1 min When it comes to forwarding addresses on your website, there are a few different scenarios to consider. First you have the “always forwarded” pieces like I shared a few years ago, to catch special URLs or typo domains. The other scenario is when you build a new website to replace your old one, and want […]
Does “near me” help your website rank better?
Reading Time: 2 min Many people include the words “near me” when performing local searches on Google, such as searching for something like “car dealer near me”. Google understands this, and essentially extracts “near me” and just runs it as a local search, which makes sense. However, if Google treats it that way, does it make sense to include […]
Your product doesn’t need to be perfect
Reading Time: 2 min Your product isn’t perfect, and that’s probably ok. In most cases, the perfect product doesn’t exist, so you just need to have the best available option. Take any product that is considered to be best in class, and you can quickly find some issues with it. The iPhone doesn’t offer some of the flexibility of […]
Plans never work perfectly, but they’re essential
Reading Time: < 1 min We’re coming to that point in the year when many January 1st goals are beginning to fade. In some cases that can be kind of a bad thing (“no more eating healthy!”), but in a lot of cases it’s because your plans have merely shifted, and that’s often a great result. Dwight D. Eisenhower once […]
If you have toxic links pointing to your website, just ignore them
Reading Time: < 1 min If you run auditing tools on your website, they’ll often find “toxic” links (from spammy sites) that link to yours, and advise you to work to get rid of those links. While those links won’t do you any good, they’re not worth worrying about. Generally speaking, your best course of action when you find those […]
Your eyes follow your mouse
Reading Time: 2 min It seems pretty logical, and it is, but when someone is moving their mouse around their computer screen, their eyes tend to follow. A paper out of Carnegie Mellon University studied this to determine exactly how much a person’s eyes match their mouse movements. They found: 84% of the times that a region was visited […]
Own your content and join the POSSE
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve talked many times on here about how I believe we should all work to own our content. Having content in a system that you control is absolutely the way to go, and then you can use other channels (like social media) as a means to share it. Along those very lines is a great […]
Going beyond accessibility to reduce motion
Reading Time: 2 min Building websites that are accessible to all users is something that continues to be a problem on much of the web, but it’s continuing to improve over time. For most sites, some simple steps will get you going in the right direction and put you ahead of most other sites in helping users with disabilities […]
Website themes are not content
Reading Time: < 1 min When building websites, people are often concerned about not duplicating content across pages or sites. While there is no specific penalty for that, if Google thinks your website has the same content as another site, one of you won’t have a chance in the rankings. So what does that mean for website themes and templates? […]