Tag Archives: SEO

Performance-101: www.liveads.co.za

Posted by on June 3, 2010 1 comment

At bidorbuy we have worked very hard to optimise website-performance to achieve a relatively good user-experience. We believe that with good performance comes lots of link-love from Google and sofar we have seen this pay off.

I am always interested in looking out for possible competition, and just noticed today, that Vodacom launched a half-baked classifieds website over at Liveads.co.za. I used to consult for Vodacom in the past and found it rather embarrassing as the website looks like the Wayback Machine came and visited.

It does take a lot to put a website together and score an “F” like Juju:

More so, it takes a lot of disregard and effort to make it to all “F”s, but it is not just the look and feel, but also the performance characteristics of the site:

  • It takes 18 seconds to download the homepage which only starts rendering after 11 seconds. On a primed cache it still takes 14 seconds for the page to load which only starts rendering after 8 seconds. This is already bad as Google deems any site rendering above 3,5 seconds as slow.
  • Your momma is so fat: I hope not, but the home-page is. Weighing in at a proud 604KB. Even with a primed cache all 30 images displayed are uncached and result in 159KB of data every time. (Perhaps a clever ploy to get extra money from 3G subscribers?)
  • Not sure how LiveAds managed to do it, but even a primed cache results in a dreadful long load time — not to worry, overpaid consultants at Vodies, I provide you a solution for free in the bullets below.
  • Turn on compression: This is in the webmasters for dummy, takes about 2 minutes to configure and provides sensational results.
  • Cache control: How on earth did you manage to de-configure your server that none of your 63 resources referenced on your homepage has any expiry, last-modified or cache-control settings?
  • Javascript kiddies at work: 14 Javascript files referenced, inline jQuery code and some weird Google-tracking code. Minify your JS, include only what is necessary and Google Async Tracking is your friend.
  • Deferred loading: All those pretty 14 Javscript files also block all other resources from loading. This costs you over 8-10 seconds as the browser is not able to render the remainder of the page. Combine those 14 JS into one file and place it at the bottom of the body or defer loading altogether.
  • ETags: Don’t use ETags with a default install of your webserver. ETags consist of the inode which is a unique file-descriptor and this will result in your ETag always to be different in a load-balanced environment. Use proper expiry/last-modified rules and cache-controls instead.
  • Amazon cloud: So you use Amazon CDN for image storage and even managed to get no expiry/cache-control on those – how did you make this happen?
  • Sloppy site images: Your Grid-images are cute, but if you had applied proper JPEG compression, you would have reduced both images from 80KB per image down to 20KB – quite a difference in load-time (considering that those are not even cached)
  • KeepAlive: Your web-server has none. Your sysadmin should know about persistent connections. You site will not scale and ever perform with basics lacking.
  • Local is Lekker: Yes, we live in a global village, but serving the site out of Egypt to your local users is just strange. Big data-center with own ISP-services and off-shore hosting? Vote of confidence right here. A DNS lookup exceeds 500ms (should be below 100ms) and it takes on avg 200ms to just establish a connection to those individual resources (14 Javascript * 200ms connect time = 2,8 seconds / download-time for a 42KB-resource = 1,4 seconds).
  • Redirects: Why oh why do you have to do a redirect from your home-page to “/en/home” – this is a client-side redirect and costs me another 500ms?

The above should be a lesson to any corporate on how to build websites. I fear that the very same people will also advise on SEO (you do realise that your site has absolutely no SEO value) and it will be interesting to see how long this site will be around. My Internet-death prediction: 2 months (but not without spending lots of more money to beat that dead horse).

To avoid repeats like this: YSlow, Google PageSpeed, Firebug and HTML Validator should be standards tools for any project and no website should go live without good ratings.

Try a visual comparison via which.loadsfaster.com



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Google’s old search is back

Posted by on May 14, 2010 No comments

If you have recently visited Google, you will have noticed that the search has changed. During one of my SEO sessions for bidorbuy I thought it would be worthwhile reviewing Google’s own robots.txt.

Google Logo

At first, the Disallow for unclesam caught my eye – in essence a customised search across government institutions.

If you look through the robots.txt file, you will also come across the custom-tag which will actually give you back almost the old layout of the old Google search.

BTW: While you are at it, have a look at the links for linux, bsd, and microsoft.

Tick… tock… lets see how long it takes for those links to change the search format.

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jQuery revolution @ bidorbuy

Posted by on April 2, 2010 No comments

Over at bidorbuy.co.za we are really introducing a number of firsts in the online auction market. We obviously want to create a user-experience for our buyers and sellers to enjoy their time on our site as well as improve productivity.

Over the next few weeks we will introduce many new features to improve usability. A few weeks back we implemented a jQuery-based search-recommendation which provides users with guided searches and search-recommendations – although noticeable, the new feature is not intrusive.

Another cool feature (it is surprising that we never had this in the past) is to introduce an image-gallery for sellers which will really improve how they can list items. The current image system is truly cumbersome and users are not even able to view images they previously uploaded. The new gallery truly rocks:

Based on jQuery with lazy loading of pages, image transitions, keyboard support, sorting and filtering. The gallery will seamlessly integrate into the seller-tools as well as the current listing functionality. We will also introduce a number of really cool UX features over the next few weeks which will make your auction experience a truly awesome journey :D

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I have been robbed…

Posted by on March 1, 2008 2 comments

For South African’s the above tag-line is nothing unusual. The crime-rate is quite high and pretty much everyone had a run-in with criminals over the years or at least knows close relatives or colleagues who have been affected by this.

Fortunately I was not a victim of South African crime, but a victim of internet theft. I have been in the consulting business for more than 15 years and have built up quite a impressive CV over those years. I have spent more than two years tweaking it to the state it is, and now enjoy the fruits of my labor by getting #1 Google search rankings when you search for “senior websphere architect“.

It was quite an unpleasant surprise, when I checked my page-ranking the other day and I found this:

At least three people decided to steal (Free dictionary definition: “To take (the property of another) without right or permission.“) not just the layout and color scheme of my website, but also the content.

Many people would think that this is not very severe – but think about this:

  • Due to my Google search ranking I get contacted on average by 5-15 agencies, employers and headhunters a week
  • I do not have to go out and apply for jobs anymore. Over the last 8 years, every consulting position I had was offered to me and for each one I had at least another 2 fallback options
  • Everyone knows that it takes substantial effort to get a high Google search ranking. There are hundreds of SEO (search engine optimization) companies out there making lots of money in helping companies to achieve this.
  • AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: People copying my layout, stealing my content and search optimizations ultimately affect my income – Less companies will contact me, resulting in fewer contracts which ultimately affects my pocket – in my mind this is the same as taking money straight out of my wallet.

Funny for me was, that one of the guys did not even bother to change the favicon – which still shows my picture on his website – see red circle in the picture above – the right tab is my website.

Not to be unfair, at least one of the people responded within 24 hours to my email, took his site down and apologized. The others have not bothered responding.

I am more than reasonable – if you had just asked, I would have allowed you to take some content/layout from my site.

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