Screen Shot: Reduce Load Time & Increase Google Crawl Budget

We've been talking a lot about Google crawl budget recently but here is a tweet that Google's John Mueller retweeted from Twitter Rasmus Sørensen where he said he was able to reduce his load time on his server by 50% which resulted in his crawl budget "exploding."

Here is the crawl stats from his Google Search Console report showing the trend upwards after reducing his load time on his server:

Significant improvements, which may lead to more pages being indexed by Google and potentially more content opportunities for the site to show up in Google for more queries.

I think the relaunch was successful! Load time down by 50%, crawl budget exploded, a LOT more pages in the index. #seo #searchconsole http://pic.twitter.com/ThQkT3KxF4

— Rasmus Sørensen (@rumbas) February 24, 2017

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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AdWords Price Extensions now live on all devices

Google introduced Price Extensions in AdWords last July to show prices on types of products and services in text ads. The extensions are now eligible to show on all devices, not just mobile.

I haven’t seen them in the wild yet, but the example Google provided shows three price extensions in the desktop version.

This is similar to the cards used in the mobile format using swipeable cards that has been around since November.

With this change, advertisers now have the option of setting separate mobile URLs for price extensions.

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About The Author

As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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Report: Google Answers, Knowledge Cards & Live Results Reach 50% Of Google's Results

RankRanger, an SEO platform, reported yesterday via Twitter that their SERP features tracking tool has found that Google Answer related boxes, such as the knowledge cards and live results - not the featured snippets (more on the difference here) has reached to over 50% of the first page results on Google.

Of course, RankRanger does not track all queries Google sees, but from their sampling of what they track, which is obviously limited, it reached over 50%.

Here is their chart:

What are Knowledge Cards & Live Results?

Google is smarter every day and thus more confident in showing these answers at the top.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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Google AdWords Price Extensions Now On All Devices Including Desktop

When Google launched price extensions for AdWords last year, it was just for mobile devices. Shortly after, Google changed the format to a horizontal carousel look.

Now Google is launching these price extensions on all devices including desktop.

Here is a picture from Google from this Google AdWords Help thread:

Cassie from Google wrote, "to help people compare your products and prices regardless of the device they're using, price extensions can now show on all devices." "Price extensions can now reach more of your potential customers with no additional work. You can continue to use your existing price extension URLs, or take advantage of the final mobile URL field to use a separate URL for mobile devices," she added.

Forum discussion at Google AdWords Help.

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Google Official Tips On Closing A Site For Days (For Maybe Shabbat)

We've talked a lot about sites that close down once a week or more for religious purposes, specifically closing on Shabbat. We were concerned about how GoogleBot handles it, will rankings drop and what about sites that show interstitials as a message to their customers about being closed, will they be hit by the penalty?

Well, Google's John Mueller who has been fielding most of these questions wrote on the Google blog closing down for the day and three options webmasters have for dealing with such issues. So these are the official recommendations from Google on how to handle Shabbat and other concerns for being offline.

Here is what Google wrote:

Option: Block cart functionality

If a site only needs to block users from buying things, the simplest approach is to disable that specific functionality. In most cases, shopping cart pages can either be blocked from crawling through the robots.txt file, or blocked from indexing with a robots meta tag. Since search engines either won't see or index that content, you can communicate this to users in an appropriate way. For example, you may disable the link to the cart, add a relevant message, or display an informational page instead of the cart.

Option: Always show interstitial or pop-up

If you need to block the whole site from users, be it with a "temporarily unavailable" message, informational page, or popup, the server should return a 503 HTTP result code ("Service Unavailable"). The 503 result code makes sure that Google doesn't index the temporary content that's shown to users. Without the 503 result code, the interstitial would be indexed as your website's content.

Googlebot will retry pages that return 503 for up to about a week, before treating it as a permanent error that can result in those pages being dropped from the search results. You can also include a "Retry after" header to indicate how long the site will be unavailable. Blocking a site for longer than a week can have negative effects on the site's search results regardless of the method that you use.

Option: Switch whole website off

Turning the server off completely is another option. You might also do this if you're physically moving your server to a different data center. For this, have a temporary server available to serve a 503 HTTP result code for all URLs (with an appropriate informational page for users), and switch your DNS to point to that server during that time.

1. Set your DNS TTL to a low time (such as 5 minutes) a few days in advance.
2. Change the DNS to the temporary server's IP address.
3. Take your main server offline once all requests go to the temporary server.
4. … your server is now offline ...
5. When ready, bring your main server online again.
6. Switch DNS back to the main server's IP address.
7. Change the DNS TTL back to normal.

Thank you John for putting this together!

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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After 18 Years, DMOZ, The Web Directory, Is Closing Down

DMOZ, one of the oldest and most trusted web directories announced on their home page yesterday that they are closing up shop. The site is going offline March 14, 2017.

DMOZ launched on June 5, 1998, over 18 years ago and will be shutting its doors in 14 days from now.

DMOZ just did a large redesign less than a year ago. This comes after Yahoo closed the Yahoo Directory a couple years ago.

Here is a picture of the home page as it looks today:

There is tons of discussion around this in the SEO community. We have WebmasterWorld, Creasite Forums, Google Web Search Help, BlackHatWorld and more.

John Mueller said the it isnt the end of the web and SEO is not dead:

@merlinox Probably won't be the end of the web. SEO won't be dead. Almost certainly.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) March 1, 2017

Here are some of the other comments from the community:

Wow, not that it will change the face of the World, but it was one of the big thing of the Internet, at some point.

Sad. It was so good that even Google plundered it.

Back in the day, we all wanted to start with the letter "A". Farewell with love DMOZ

Old and out dated model, this was going to be on the cards eventually.

And an SEO question:

After 14th March 2014, does NON-ODP will be the default Google setting? And Google will not pick up result from DMOZ?

Clearly it doesn't matter.

An end of an era!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Creasite Forums, Google Web Search Help, BlackHatWorld and more.

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A Google Cake Hat

Here is a photo I found on Instagram of a cake but in the form of a hat with the Google logo on it. There is also a cartoon character on top, in a dog costume with a frog next to it. Oh and don't forget the hashtag #beautyjunkies.

I think it is a cake at least? Maybe I am wrong?

This post is part of our daily Search Photo of the Day column, where we find fun and interesting photos related to the search industry and share them with our readers.

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