April 2010 Digest
April has been a very busy month so this months digest is short-and-sweet. I’ve also got another PHP tutorial in progress which looks at truncating strings of text for improved aesthetics in the next couple of weeks.
SEO
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using Site Speed in Web Search Ranking
Google announced the use of page load time in their algorithm. We saw this one coming with the inclusion of page load time data in Webmaster Tools and Google’s Page Speed tool.
Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.
Further reading:
Search Engine Roundtable: April 2010 Google Webmaster Report
Yoast: Site Speed Ranking Factors
Matt Cutt’s Blog: Site Speed
jQuery
Sitepoint: Earle Castledine highlighted some of his favourite new features in jQuery 1.4. This is worth a read if you don’t want to get bogged down with every single new feature in jQuery, but instead see some practical uses for the new features and changes in version 1.4.
Other News
Ajaxian: Firefox Account Manager
Mozilla have been working on an interesting project called Account Manager that will enable users to log into the browser and subsequently have access to their stored passwords and login details.
The specification proposes using a static JSON document, automatically discovered by the browser, which describes what login methods the site supports. In addition, The browser needs a way to check which user (if any) is currently signed in. To do this, an HTTP header directive is set in the same code where you would set a cookie with a session ID. Watch the video here.
As a sidenote, I recently launched my new personal site this month, Robin Parduez.
Finally, a decent number of add-ons are available for Google Chrome. This is a great list of useful SEO add-ons for Search Professionals.