India Site Clinic - Part 3

As part of Site Clinic series with the two blog posts, we have addressed the top four trends - canonicalization, duplicate content, alt attribute for describing images & Sitemaps. While reviewing websites that were submitted through this event, we noticed slow page load time to be another major trend. Load time is the time taken for a web page to open completely in the user’s browser.

In lieu of the recent announcement about site speed being used as a ranking factor, we thought we will end this series with a post on how to make the your websites faster.

Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests. Ultimately, if the load time of a web page is decreased, it will make for a better user experience. There are several free tools available on web to evaluate the page speed. One such Google tool is the open source Firefox/Firebug add-on called Page Speed which helps webmasters to assess the speed of a web page by generating results on the basis of our best practices.

http://www.royalchemists.com/ is a chemist’s website with a neat layout. The content clearly conveys a message that they are in business for a very long time and has customer testimonials on home page itself, which is a value add. Page Speed score for the home page when we reviewed was 78/100, which is a decent Page Speed. Let us discuss few parameters of the Page Speed results that this page scored well and what to be improved on.

This page scores well on the following parameters

• Minimizing the round-trip times (RTTs)
• CSS placement

The website scores on combine External CSS and combine External JS which helps the page to cut down on RTTs and delays in downloading other resources. Also, CSS is placed right on top of the document head as the element helps pages appear to load quicker since this allows pages to render progressively.

What can be improved?

Please have a look at the waterfall-view for http://www.royalchemists.com/ that we did using http://www.webpagetest.org/ .

This page uses lots of images as icons which will slow down the page while loading on browser. Using CSS image Sprites would help the page to reduce the number of HTTP requests and increase the page speed.

In addition, compressing the below components with gzip will help reduce the HTTP response time:

• http://www.royalchemists.com/
• http://www.royalchemists.com/style.css
• http://www.royalchemists.com/menus.js

This web page can score more by adding a far future expires header to the static components like image file components. It means setting up an expiration date in future for the resources to be cached will help browser fetch and use the cached version when page is loading after the first run.

Check this video on the post of Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead from our team, who talks about the need for the page speed and how to add Expires header.

We hope this blogpost will encourage webmaster look into ways to speed up their website and in turn the overall speed of the web.

Check out this video of Matt Cutts, a Webspam Engineer from our team, who clarified if page speed is a critical factor in ranking or not. You can read more about Site performance on our Webmaster Help Center and also can use the webmaster tool feature called Site performance which will give site performance statistics.

With this blogpost we would like to conclude our current Site Clinic series and we would like to thank you all profusely for making this a great success.

Posted By Search Quality Team.

Adding Images to your Sitemaps

(Cross-posted from the Google Webmaster Central Blog)

Sitemaps are an invaluable resource for search engines. They can highlight the important content on a site and allow crawlers to quickly discover it. Images are an important element of many sites and search engines could equally benefit from knowing which images you consider important. This is particularly true for images that are only accessible via JavaScript forms, or for pages that contain many images but only some of which are integral to the page content.

Now you can use a Sitemaps extension to provide Google with exactly this information. For each URL you list in your Sitemap, you can add additional information about important images that exist on that page. You don’t need to create a new Sitemap, you can just add information on images to the Sitemap you already use.

Adding images to your Sitemaps is easy. Simply follow the instructions in the Webmaster Tools Help Center or refer to the example below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>

We index billions of images and see hundreds of millions of image-related queries each day. To take advantage of that traffic most effectively, take a moment to update your Sitemap file with information on the images from your site. Let us know in the Sitemaps forum if you have any questions.

Posted by Alkis Evlogimenos, Software Engineer

India Site Clinic - Part 2

In our previous post, we wrote about how addressing canonicalization can help search engines to more accurately decide which URLs to present for your site. Now, we'd like to cover two other important aspects that came up during our site clinic which help search engines understand what content is available on your site: the "alt" attribute for describing images and Sitemaps for listing your pages.

Alt attributes for images
In (X)HTML, the "alt" attribute of an <img> tag is the text that is used as alternative text content for an image. For example, it can be dispilayed if the image fails to load. It is one of the signals used by search engines to understand images.

Head over to andrinemendez.com . The home page is very neat to look at and bound to catch your eye. But if you notice, all content on the main site is within images. While it may look nice to have the text completely in the images, but from a search engine perspective the content becomes unreadable. In order to make your web sites more search engine friendly and to help search engines and the users who can't view the images, we recommend using the "alt" attribute of an <img> tag to describe your images. This makes it easier for search engine crawlers to index the images and also makes your web pages user friendly as the "alt" text shows up in place of the image when it fails to load.

To learn more about the alt attribute, check out this post and video about how to make your images more discoverable.

Sitemaps
Essentially, a Sitemap file is a list of all URLs on your site that you want to be indexed. Sitemaps provide a way for search engines to find URLs on your site that may not be linked to by many other pages. If you'd like to know more about the use of Sitemaps, you may be interested in a study presented by Uri Schonfeld at a WWW'09 conference in Madrid last year.

At andrinemendez.com/sitemap.xml , we find a simple XML Sitemap file in place. It's great to see Sitemaps being used here. If you look at it, you can see the amount of information it provides for each URL. An issue with this Sitemap file is that the URLs have a change-frequency that does not match the actual change dates (homepage weekly vs last change in December). While the change frequency is good information to include, one should ensure that it is correct else the purpose is not served and it would be better to just remove these attributes otherwise.

You can learn more about Sitemaps on our Webmaster Help Center or read some additional FAQ's regarding Sitemaps for more information. And if you don’t have a Sitemap yet don’t forget to create one!

Remember, it’s all about making it easy for users to find and understand your content. Hope we helped!

Our last post to this series will be out soon so stay tuned. Let us know your thoughts in our Webmaster Help Group.

Posted by Search Quality Team

India Site Clinic - Part 1

It is a pleasure to bring first installment of our Site Clinic series. We've had hundreds of you asking us a variety of questions & tips on improving the way your website is shown in our search results. We'd like to say a big thank you for an amazing response from our entire search quality team. Given the huge response, we thought it would be fair to address broader trends rather than to focus on individual websites. The trend we are going to focus on today, the most prominent of the lot, is called 'canonicalization.' This was an issue with about half of the Indian websites that were submitted.

Let's start with the basics.

What is canonicalization?
The term "canonicalization" may sound a bit technical, but it is simply the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices available.

For example:
http://www.example.com/
http://example.com/
https://example.com/
http://example.com/index.html
http://www.example.com/index.html

When we crawl the web we can find a number of different addresses that sometimes show the same page. This can confuse our systems and result in taking longer to review your webpages and perhaps not showing the best URL in our search results.

Sounds good in theory? Do you want to see a real example?

Yes, freewaresnbeta.com is a nice looking blog about freewares and software. This website serves as a good example to explain the implications of the canonicalization effect. The live page http://www.freewaresnbeta.com/ loads well, but the the non-www version http://freewaresnbeta.com/ loads a page saying that the site is 'under construction.'

The 'non-www' version

The 'www' version

The above two pages look different : The non-www version is probably showing a webpage left from when the webmaster was building the site. As you notice the web addresses are so similar, users might accidentally link to the non-www one. This can lead to their visitors (and our crawlers) being sent to the wrong URL and being confused by the content shown there. When it's easy for other people to link to your proper webpages, more visitors will be able to view your pages and recommend them to their friends.

What's the solution?

There's a pretty neat facility in Webmaster Tools where you can set your preferred version (www or non-www) to be crawled by Google. Once you pick your preferred destination URL, use 301 redirects to send traffic from other URL variants to your preferred URL, so that the valuable ranking factors are carried along with the redirect. It is also advisable to use the preferred version for internal linking and advertising.

Let's talk about another important implication for canonicalization - Duplicate content.

Most web hosts consider 'www' as a default submain to the main domain and automatically configure it to have the same content as the non-www versions. This can lead us to access the website more than necessary, perhaps slowing down the website load time for normal users and also confusing users by showing the same content in the search results twice. While Google is very good at automatically detecting the best version, webmasters can help improve our accuracy by making use of the rel=canonical link tag element as well as our URL parameter handling tool in Webmaster Tools.

In summary, here are some best practices to avoid having a canonicalization issue with your website:

• Set your preferred version in Webmaster Tools (www or non-www).
• Set a 301 redirect from the non-preferred version to the perferred version.
• Have consistent internal linking (always use the preferred version to hyperlink).
• Always make sure you advertise only the preferred version.
• Make use of "rel=canonical" and the URL parameter handling tool in Webmaster Tools.

Check out this video of Matt Cutts, a Webspam Engineer from our team, talking about canonical link element.

If you have an opinion or any questions on the topic, please join our conversation in the Webmaster Help Group .

We hope this article and those that will follow are going to be useful, not only for the discussed websites, but also for all webmasters who read this blog.

That's all! Until our next post…!

P.S. Do keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive study, but a set of general recommendations for Google search .

Posted by Search Quality Team