September 2018 – Affordable Blog

GOOGLE WANTS TO KILL THE URL

Google’s Chrome browser turns 10 today, and in its short life it has introduced a lot of radical changes to the web. From popularizing auto-updates to aggressively promoting HTTPS web encryption, the Chrome security team likes to grapple with big, conceptual problems. That reach and influence can be divisive, though, and as Chrome looks ahead to its next 10 years, the team is mulling its most controversial initiative yet: fundamentally rethinking URLs across the web.

Uniform Resource Locators are the familiar web addresses you use every day. They are listed in the web’s DNS address book and direct browsers to the right Internet Protocol addresses that identify and differentiate web servers. In short, you navigate to WIRED.com to read WIRED so you don’t have to manage complicated routing protocols and strings of numbers. But over time, URLs have gotten more and more difficult to read and understand. As web functionality has expanded, URLs have increasingly become unintelligible strings of gibberish combining components from third-parties or being masked by link shorteners and redirect schemes. And on mobile devices there isn’t room to display much of a URL at all.

The resulting opacity has been a boon for cyber criminals who build malicious sites to exploit the confusion. They impersonate legitimate institutions, launch phishing schemes, hawk malicious downloads, and run phony web services—all because it’s difficult for web users to keep track of who they’re dealing with. Now the Chrome team says it’s time for a massive change.

“People have a really hard time understanding URLs,” says Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome’s engineering manager. “They’re hard to read, it’s hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don’t think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they’re talking to when they’re using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we’re figuring out the right way to convey identity.”

If you’re having a tough time thinking of what could possibly be used in place of URLs, you’re not alone. Academics have considered options over the years, but the problem doesn’t have an easy answer. Porter Felt and her colleague Justin Schuh, Chrome’s principal engineer, say that even the Chrome team itself is still divided on the best solution to propose. And the group won’t offer any examples at this point of the types of schemes they are considering.

Original Article Here

How to Get Your WordPress Website Verified on Pinterest

Posted by John Hughes on Sep 18, 2018 05:00 am

A lot of people favor platforms such as Instagram over Pinterest, although the latter can be a fantastic source of traffic – particularly for image-heavy sites. However, without a verified website, people can share your content without others knowing where it came from. If you verify your WordPress website on Pinterest, you may get more.

If you verify your WordPress website on Pinterest, you may get more traffic back from the platform. In this article, we’ll talk about why that is, then teach you two methods to verify your website. Let’s get to work!

Why You Should Verify Your WordPress Website on Pinterest

Original Article Here

Wix vs. WordPress? The Data Doesn’t Lie

Httparchive published the First Contentful Paint scores of top content management systems. It showed Wix dead last behind every CMS in the analysis for the fastest scores.

However, Wix pulled ahead of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal in other areas.

The data reveals actionable trends.

First contentful paint (FCP) is a user experience metric. It measures how fast a webpage shows usable content to site visitors.

Wix performed last out of the four content management systems under consideration.

In the full analysis of the performance of 25 content management systems, including Weebly, TYpo3 and others, Wix performed the worst.

What the graph shows is that:

Only 7.99 percent of the Wix sites measured were able to earn a Fast ranking.
30.94 percent the WordPress sites measured achieved a Fast ranking.

That’s a huge performance difference between Wix and WordPress – 7.99 percent versus 30.94 percent.

Fastest Mobile FCP Scores

Wix performance scores actually improved when tested in the mobile environment.

Of all the Wix sites measured, 9.01 percent were able to achieve a ranking of Fast on mobile.

Nevertheless, Wix is still ranked last out of a total of 290 content management systems analyzed for achieving a score of Fast.

The number of WordPress sites ranked as Fast on mobile was 19.12 percent.

Wix Beats WordPress, Joomla, Drupal

Among the top content management systems, Wix is a winner in the area of First Contentful Paint that arguably matters the most.
There were three rankings for the speed at which First Contentful Paint was achieved: Fast, Average, and Slow.
Every content management system analyzed had more sites ranking as Average than Fast or Slow.

Original Article Here

CMS’s vs Website Builders: What’s the Difference and Which Should You Choose?

CMS’s vs Website Builders: What’s the Difference and Which Should You Choose?

CMS’s and website builders are some of the most popular methods of building websites. Both can build excellent quality websites. Which solution you need will depend on your website and business goals. In this article, we’ll look at CMS vs website builders, see what their differences are, and help you decide which you should choose.

The terms CMS and website builder are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are different things and they approach building websites differently. When comparing CMS’s vs website builders, it helps to know exactly what we’re talking about.

CMS’s manage the website’s content, such as blog posts, and you can add a theme on top of that management system.

Website Builders can include blogs, but their focus and strength is in providing the tools to build the website. Such as a frontend visual website building interface.

Original Article Here

15 More tips for improving your website – Issue no. 7

15 More tips for improving your website – Issue no. 7
Remember, a website is never finished. We’ve collected 15 more simple website tips you can do right now to improve your website.

The goal of your social pages
Many small businesses start with Facebook as their only online presence. While it’s a cheap way to get online, clients need to understand that their social pages should ultimately drive people to their “home”: their website.

Use a single-column design for your forms
A single-column design is best for your forms readability. Many people now use mobile devices to fill out forms. Since mobile devices, have less screen space, it makes sense to use a single-column design.

Original Article Here

Case study: The tale of two internal link tweaks

Contributor Dave Davies shares a case study that shows how smart internal link building and targeted SEO can have a significant impact on rankings and traffic.

Dave Davies on August 27, 2018 at 12:39 pm

Back in 2016, I wrote a piece on optimizing internal linking structures. In the article, we discussed a range of issues from PageRank and link equity flow to anchor text and more. I wrote the article after performing an audit on a large e-commerce site called Trophy Central.

Since several years have gone by and the site now has a slightly different SEO focus, the owner has graciously allowed me to share the details of that audit, the SEO optimization plan that emerged from it and the results.

There were two core recommendations I gave the owner after my research, review and audit, I’ll outline what they were, why, and how they were implemented by the dev team.

1. Recommendation: Navigation

At the time of the review, the site did not have drop-down navigation. Having drop-down navigation doesn’t apply to all sites but works well for many e-commerce sites and did on this one.

The principle at play here is to drive PageRank to deeper pages. There is a caveat, however. The more links you put in your navigation the less any one of them is worth. Basically, each page has a set amount of PageRank to pass and that PageRank is divided among the links on that page so the fewer the number of links, the more weight they pass.

Pages with products and categories should limit the links they have pointing to pages of importance. With a combination of keyword research to discover search volumes and the client’s understanding of the return on investment (ROI) of product sets we ended up with:

Read Entire Article Here

Why websites should be using HSTS to improve security and SEO

If you want added security, faster load times and stronger SEO for your site, contributor John Lincoln walks through why and how you should be using HSTS for a better user and ranking experience.

John E Lincoln on August 27, 2018 at 2:20 pm

Site users and search engines don’t take website security lightly which is probably why you’ve likely heard of added security measures like HTTPS.

But a lesser-known security layer called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is also available and can help protect your site and your search engine optimization (SEO) as well. Let’s walk through what HSTS is and how it works.

HSTS

HSTS is a response header that informs the browser it can only connect to a certain website using HTTPS. HSTS increases both the speed and security of HTTPS websites. To fully understand what HSTS does, you need a little working knowledge of HTTPS.

HTTPS

HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) is a secure version of HTTP. When a user connects to a site using HTTPS, the website then encrypts the session with a secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate. In layman’s terms, it adds an extra layer of security to the site session and protects against hackers who may try to steal information from web users.

As you can imagine, this is especially useful for e-commerce, banking, or other transaction sites like Paypal, which require users to enter sensitive information.

Whether or not a site uses HTTPS is clearly visible to users. Those that are secure will feature a green secure symbol by the URL.

Read Original Article Here

Google Ads introduces ‘ad strength’ indicator & reporting for responsive search ads

Ad strength will be visible when advertisers create responsive search ads as well as in a new column in the web interface.

Ginny Marvin on August 27, 2018 at 2:11 pm

One of the loudest complaints I’ve heard so far about Google’s new responsive search ads — which are still in beta — is a lack of reporting on which combinations work best. Another is how to tell if there is enough variety in the options advertisers provide while still being relevant to the ad group. Google announced a few updates Monday to help advertisers manage responsive search ads more effectively.

Ad strength indicator

Google has pushed advertisers to have at least three ads per ad group for more than a year now, and responsive search ads are aimed at helping advertisers meet that goal. The ideas is that more ads should drive more impressions and clicks for an ad group overall. Google stresses that the ads should be “diverse” — gone are the days of simply micro-testing “Buy now” versus “Shop now,” for example. The new ad strength measures relevance, quantity and diversity of the ad copy in responsive search ads. The indicator ranges from “Poor” to “Excellent” and provides suggestions such as “Add more headlines.”

Starting in early September, ad strength will be available as a column in the interface. It will show up in the ad creation interface for responsive search ads over the next few weeks. In the coming months, it will also be available for responsive display ads.

Read Entire Article Here

4 Simple AdWords Features That Every Beginner Overlooks

Before we jump into the lesser-known strategies, let’s just make sure we get the absolute basics out of the way.

The most fundamental question that we need to answer is: Are qualified visitors clicking your ad?

We qualify visitors by the keywords they search, and there’s no faster way to saw through your budget than to show your ads for the wrong keyword searches.

1. Check your search terms report

Step one of any PPC audit is to see what keyword phrases people are searching before clicking your ad. You’ll find the search terms report under the keywords tab.

I still can’t pry myself away from the old AdWords interface, but seeing as Google will officially be forcing the new AdWords interface on us at the end of this year, we’ll show you how it’s done in the new version.

Select the campaign or ad group you want to analyze. Click the keywords tab on the left, then click the search terms tab across the top.

In terms of looking for trouble, it’s a good idea to order the results by the number of clicks. That way, if you see phrases in there you don’t like, you can see the worst offenders at the top.

Full Article Here

Google faces potential class action, FTC penalties for ‘surreptitious’ location tracking

A lawsuit filed last week and a request for the FTC to enforce a consent decree both stem from the AP story about location tracking.

Greg Sterling on August 21, 2018 at 12:52 pm

A California resident named Napoleon Patacsil has filed a lawsuit against Google in federal court (Patacsil v. Google, Inc.) seeking class action status. The suit alleges personal injuries in the form of various California privacy violations stemming from “surreptitious monitoring” of user location.

The suit was filed after an AP article identified the fact that Google location capture still occurs on mobile devices even when Location History is turned off. Following the report, Google changed help language to clarify that location is still used, even though Location History is disabled.

The new language reads:

This [Location History] setting does not affect other location services on your device, like Google Location Services and Find My Device. Some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other services, like Search and Maps. When you turn off Location History for your Google Account, it’s off for all devices associated with that Google Account.

The litigation was first reported by Reuters.

There are a number of privacy-related claims in the lawsuit, one of which is that Google’s conduct violates California penal code section 637.7, which prohibits the use of “an electronic tracking device to determine the location or movement of a person.” There are two exceptions: for user consent and for valid uses by law enforcement (e.g., with a search warrant).

Litigation firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein is apparently representing plaintiff Patacsil. Should the suit achieve class action status, it could make the case very expensive for Google. However, Google’s liability is not certain, nor are damages.

Unless provided by statute, the damages aspect of the case is challenging for the plaintiff to prove. Google could and likely would argue that location services make phones perform better and that he and any potential class members can’t show they were harmed by Google Search or Maps’ use of location.

In parallel with the litigation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the facts in the AP article constitute a violation of a consent decree (.pdf) the company agreed to in 2011. EPIC told the FTC:

[Location tracking] clearly violates Google’s 2011 settlement with the FTC. Google is not permitted to track users after they have made clear in their privacy settings that they do not want to be tracked. This privacy violation affects all Android users and iPhone users who use Google Maps or search. EPIC urges the Commission to enforce its Order and hold Google accountable.

Original Article Here