Just Make It Faster
As a user, how often have you thought “I wish this web service was faster.” As a CEO, how often have you said “just make it faster.” Or, more simply, “why is this damn thing so slow?”
Make your websites run faster, automatically — try mod_pagespeed for Apache
Webmaster Level: All
Last year, as part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, we introduced Page Speed, a tool that gives developers suggestions to speed up web pages. It’s usually pretty straightforward for developers and webmasters to implement these suggestions by updating their web server configuration, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. But we thought we could make it even easier — ideally these optimizations should happen with minimal developer and webmaster effort.
So today, we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.
Here are a few simple optimizations that are a pain to do manually, but that mod_pagespeed excels at:
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How to Speed up WordPress
At Pubcon this year Google announced page load time was going to become a ranking factor in 2010 (see video below). Shortly after this announcement, Google started showing load time data in webmaster central. Being a bit proactive, I decided to start looking at ways to speed up this site.
17 Ways Search Engines Judge the Value of a Link
Posted by randfish
It’s 9:30am and you’ve just started a pitch for a new SEO client. They’re the curious type – wanting to know how search engines rank pages, why the changes you’ll recommend will make an impact, where you learned to do SEO, and who you can list as good examples of your work. As you dive deeper into the requirements for the project, you arrive at the link building section. The client wants to know why link building matters so much. You pull up a chart of Search Engine Ranking Factors, noting the large role that links play in the ordering algorithms. They’re mollified, but have one last question:
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Performance Research, Part 2: Browser Cache Usage – Exposed!
This is the second in a series of articles describing experiments conducted to learn more about optimizing web page performance. You may be wondering why you’re reading a performance article on the YUI Blog. It turns out that most of web page performance is affected by front-end engineering, that is, the user interface design and development.
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Help test some next-generation infrastructure
Webmaster Level: All
To build a great web search engine, you need to:
- Crawl a large chunk of the web.
- Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
- Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.
For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.
Some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet, so we’d welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google’s new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches there.
Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google’s current search results and our new system. We’re also interested in higher-level feedback (“These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system”) in addition to “This specific site should or shouldn’t rank for this query.” Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won’t have the cycles to send replies.
Here’s how to give us feedback: Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!
Posted by Sitaram Iyer, Staff Software Engineer, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer
Perform Better With AdSense: The Ultimate Round-Up
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Google AdSense is the easiest and quickest way to make your website, of any size, profitable. Sign-up, generate your ads and copy & paste the code into your web page, and…well, that’s it really. You are earning money. It works by by reading keywords from your content, and then displays content related text and image ads, thus enabling ads specifically targeted to your site and readers.
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