We’ve been teaching Website managers to block unwanted crawlers for almost a decade (see A Beginner’s Guide to Blocking Bad Bots and Rogue Crawlers, Part 1). Website scraping isn’t a new problem. The threat of AI bots learning from your Website content isn’t a new problem. The only new thing about what’s happening with Google…
What IS A Landing Page, and Other Marketing Terms
If you’re searching our Website for an explanation of what a landing page is, this is the page you want to land on. It’s a simple phrase with several similar meanings or uses. The problem with understanding what a landing page is comes down to deciding whose definition you want to live with. But given that so many different definitions have been proposed, it’s guaranteed you’ll always be using the phrase “landing page” incorrectly according to someone else’s intuition.
Why Is My Website Slow? (Guide to Making Sites Faster)
Thanks to a misunderstanding about Google’s page speed requirements, thousands of Website owners are agonizing over the speed of their sites. Website speed is very important but most of the information being shared among marketers and site owners is inaccurate.
Should You Give Google Your Phone Number?
This is a very personal question and it’s one that affects many aspects of your relationship with Google and other online service providers. My response here in this article is only meant for a specific situation. Website owners often sign up for Google services including Google Analytics, Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools), and others. Google prompts you to give them a mobile phone number to help you recover an account if you lose access for any reason. Is that really the best option?
Why Is My Website Slow?
How to Truly Optimize Any Blog for Web Search
WordPress FAQ: How to Fix Annoying Problems
WordPress like all content management systems has its ups and downs. We consider it to be an “entry-level” CMS, designed for the quickest, simplest installations possible. That’s a great advantage but it depends on assumptions either made by the WordPress development community or the technical people who install and maintain the code on your system. You might be that on-site tech today but someone may have managed the site before you. The assumptions that WordPress installations rely on are great short cuts in most use cases, but sometimes they create problems. We’ll share some of the more common problems we have run into and how to fix them below.
What are the Advantages of Dedicated Hosting over Shared Hosting?
There are three ways for you to be sure that you and you alone fully control your Web hosting experience:
A Simple Responsive Template for Mobile Friendly Web Design
Although millions of Websites are now published via free hosting services like Blogger, Tumblr, Weebly, and WordPress.com there are also millions of sites published on standalone domains. Those sites using Content Management platforms like Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress now have extensive libraries of responsive or mobile-friendly themes available to them. And yet even at Reflective Dynamics we still find ourselves occasionally upgrading static HTML Web designs to be mobile friendly. Sometimes we port the sites into WordPress but sometimes it’s just easier to keep the static HTML versions of the sites active.
Should You Use Addon Domains or Separate Hosting Accounts?
The Addon domain model has been around for a long time. The Addon domain system allows you to share resources between domains/websites on a low-budget hosting plan. It is a cheap alternative to the virtual private server and dedicated server model. It’s also less expensive to use Addon domains than to pay for a hosting plan for each domain that you register. But Addon domain hosting saves money by cutting corners and you have to take a few things into consideration. Also, as more Web hosting companies invest in cloud-based solutions their Addon options either change or are being replaced by less efficient models.
Should You Cloak XML Sitemap Pages to Bad Bots?
An interesting question came up in a recent Google Hangout. Someone asked John Mueller if it was okay to add an “X-Robots-Tag” to XML sitemap pages (you do this in your .htaccess or IIS config files). John replied that Google does not have a problem with sites cloaking their XML sitemaps since these are only intended for search engines, not users.
Open Source Software: The Definitive Guide
Open source software has multiple benefits over proprietary software, not the least of which is that most of them are free. If you’re like many people, you’re probably frustrated with the usability problems often found with proprietary programs.