Sunday, December 21st, 2008
Googlebot is one of those ethical and friendly bots that we want to come around often but some webmasters with several large sites may experience server problems when it uses way too much bandwith. How do you tell Google to decrease the amount of bandwith it uses and possibly save you some money on monthly server costs?
First, tell Googlebot to stop crawling very old pages of your site that have not been updated in over a year, have no plans to be updated soon but they are pages that must remain live on the site. Then, try adjusting the speed at which Googlebot crawls your entire site.
The folks over at Google have recently dropped some interesting knowledge on how to prevent Google from crawling very old pages of your site. While 200, 301 and 404 are widely popular HTTP status heading codes. Webmasters should start paying a bit more attention to 304-codes.
According to Google:
“You should configure your server to return this response (called the If-Modified-Since HTTP header) when a page hasn’t changed since the last time the requestor asked for it. This saves you bandwidth and overhead because your server can tell Googlebot that a page hasn’t changed since the last time it was crawled.”
This would be more useful for larger sites that have hundreds of pages and not small sites with only a few pages that wouldn’t be subject to the bandwith usage of a hyper-active Googlebot.
In Google Webmaster tools, you can also control the speed at which Googlebot crawls your site. In the Dashboard, under Settings, you will see a section for Crawl Rate. If you select “Set Custom Crawl Rate,” you will have the options to set Googlebot’s rate faster or slower:
To see granular details of Googlebot’s usage, Google now gives us access to information from the last 90 days in Crawl Stats under Statistics. There, you can view the number of pages crawled per day, number of kilobytes downloaded per day and the time spent downloading a page:
If you find that a slower Googlebot is helpful and lessens your bandwith usage, remember to re-adjust the settings in 90 days, otherwise Google will return to its automatic crawl rate. Again, only webmasters with increased bandwith issues would find this to be most helpful. Otherwise, unnecessary adjustments may hamper the number of indexed pages in Google.
Now, if only controlling all the other different web-bots was this easy!
Posted in SEO | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
Saving extra cash is crucial for businesses through this down economy. Below are some simple ideas to potentially help save your company big dollars. While some tasks below are at an intern level (not paying them isn’t one of the ideas, we were all interns once), they might just save enough extra bucks to make the holiday season a joyous one.
Spend Less for New Customers & Get Fast Feedback
An intern, or business owner with enough time, can scour search.twitter.com. You say you sell refrigerators? Awesome. Searching Broken Refrigerator brings back a tweet/day about potential customers complaining about their broken refrigerator. What a great opportunity to contact, offer an incentive, and sell. Feed numerous queries through a reader and get your Twitter sales stream going. If the tweet is providing a solution to an obvious need, it’s hard to deem these tweets spammy.
There was also one very trouble college student with a broken refrigerator who was chilling beers in a wet sock in front of his air conditioner. Wow, I really don’t miss college.
Next, searching “online deals” on 12/8 brought back Walmart Cyber Monday ads. While Walmart isn’t in the same position as the “not so big anymore” three, relevant ads are vital for a successful PPC campaign for any company.
Does your PPC manager have attention to detail? Conversion rates dropping even .25% can have a major impact on revenues. An ad displaying Cyber Monday deals leading to a page with no Cyber Monday deals is guaranteed to be an extremely unprofitable conversion rate. Be relevant with your PPC advertisements & landing pages to make the most of your budget.
Conversion rates. If your business bring in 30,000 visitors/month and the average customer spends $100/order, upping your conversion rate from 1.5% to 1.75% will bring in an extra $90,000 in sales over a year. Still don’t have the time/money to hire a usability expert?
An extremely affordable way to receive feedback on your site without spending a few thousand on a usability expert is to put out a HIT on mturk.com. A reasonable payment per HIT is $.40. You can receive feedback on your site and processes in a day for under $10. Can’t beat that with a stick.
Do the Green Thing
Going green always makes you feel better, why not get paid for it too? BoxCycle.com is one of a dozen sites that will pay for your unwanted boxes. While it may only be enough to pay the intern, something is always better than nothing.
You don’t have boxes? You already laid people off? Perfect. Take the extra software that isn’t being used and sell it back to WeBuySoft.com. This company will buy back Office, Photoshop, Corel and numerous other software products. Save money AND clean out house.
Posted in SEO | 6 Comments »