From time to time I see and look at some SEO articles to see what others are writing about and what’s new that I need to look at.
I have started reading an article about some SEO mistakes to avoid, and the first thing that stopped me from reading further was a point about “Read more” links.
It was stated that the severity of using the “read more” link for SEO is high and that the developer of the site should remove the use of “read more” links in favour of article links (for example title as a link).
That particular author claimed that when that has been done, the site visibility “went through the roof”.
Partly I can agree with that, but removing “read more” links shall not be advised if it is done right. Here is why.
I have been reading for some time that one of your solutions for better SEO will be removing pages that are not performing well and just wasting a crawl time.
Redirecting them to the most relevant part (using redirect 301) or where such doesn’t exist, pointing back to the homepage and advising search engines that it’s gone (using redirect 410).
There is one problem with removing something from a page that you spend a lot of time creating. There is a sort of sentiment in it.
Even when I migrated from WordPress to Hugo I moved all pages to a new website. I have done an initial review and did some corrections, but never looked at the test from a merit point of view.
Generally, I am against using the rule of removing content that performs poorly in search engines. Not always the case, that the content is not desired. Sometimes simply is unique and targeting the niche that shall be here for some who will need it.
With such an approach, I am creating some of my posts. To give users something that I struggle to find. You can call it niche but in reality, this is something that some people are searching for and cannot find easily. If I struggle to find a solution and I will come up with my own, I would like to share this with the world.
Are you advertising for job positions on your website?
Trying to hire somebody is a bit difficult these days in some industries, especially when companies looking carefully at their budgets, everything is getting more expensive so is salary expectations higher than usual.
When the good places to advertise a job vacancy are plenty around if the company decided to put it on the website, it’s worth using the power of Google and getting this offer working for the company (it will not find itself without the right approach).
If you looked through Google for job offers you may see that some offers are displayed directly in search results (Jobs section) and they are not paid advertising (at least not most of them). Most of them are pulled from other sites.
The good thing is, that you can add your job vacancy to Google for free as well, you just need to inform the search engine the right way.
The right way to do that is with JobPosting Schema.
If you have your own domain and you are unable to receive and send emails from this address because it involves additional costs, Cloudflare has prepared the perfect solution for you.
Email Routing (email forwarding) is a free service worth considering.
To use this option, our domain must be managed on Cloudflare’s DNS servers. If we have MX (mail) records for another service, we will need to delete and replace them.
Email Routing involves setting an email address in the domain from which each email received will be forwarded to another mailbox.
If your business email address is on a Gmail domain, why not start using email on your own domain. You will gain more prestige and professionalism, even though nothing will really change for you, because we will continue to receive mail on the mailbox that you have been using so far.
Designing a website is not a thing that I am doing for a living. My day job is giving me the security needed, and everything else is a development of myself – to see what I can do and extend my skills. If at some point these “little” skills can change into something bigger, that’s great.
See my LinkedIn profile if you want to get in touch.
When I made websites, I discover new ways of doing the same things – improvement. I am not doing things (writing websites) in the same way, that’s the main thing. A new website is a new approach. I am reusing well-working elements, but still, it’s like making everything from scratch, and I like it.
With every new creation, I discovered ways how to improve projects that I have already live, and with this one there was no exception.
Difficulty: Low
Preparation Time: 15 minutes
Baking time: 35 minutes, 170C with fan
Recipe for 22cm (8.6-inch) bundt cake tin.
If you have updated to Windows 11 from Windows 10, the below steps will help you to clean leftovers in your system and make it close enough to the performance known from the 10th edition.
If you planning (or did) to install Windows 11 from an official ISO, make sure that you using always the latest one. At the time of writing this text, the ISO available is the 2nd since the system has been presented to the world (64v1).
When Google announced that they would force us to move away from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 I wasn’t happy. Due to a lack of alternatives in minimal analytics, loading official (bloated) tracking code that weighs 171kB (in my instance), which is liable for blocking by various AdBlockers, wasn’t something that I had been looking forward to.
I started searching for a solution. Due to the lack of it, I decided, by hit-and-miss approach, to create my own, and I think I did it. It currently weighs 3kB minified (version 1.10). Its main purpose is to track page views (page_view, session_start and first_visit) on our website in Google Analytics 4 property. Since version 1.06 it detects and tracks site searches (view_search_results), from 1.07 search query (search_term), from 1.09 scrolls (scroll) capturing scroll events each time when a visitor gets to the bottom of a page (90% and below) and from 1.10 it got ability to track <a href links to files with specified extensions (see below) and all these links where there is a download attribute specified independently of the extension of the file.
We are living in a world, where everybody is trying to commercialise almost everything. If selling products and services does not bring desired income and users have had already too many subscriptions to pay for another one, there’s comes Ads.
Nobody likes Ads. They can ruin the reading experience on the website, cause our computer to choke due to excessive use of resources, or put your device or ourselves at risk due to privacy matters.
I used to use, back in 2020 ads, that display dynamically on my site, through Google AdSense. This does not even bring the return of the costs, that I put into it. What’s more annoying, using Google Ads has a huge negative impact on my website performance. Ironically, my site has been penalised by Google in their ranking, due to using their solution!
Once I migrated to Hugo and start using Netlify in their free plan, I reduced costs significantly, and because of that, I decided to banish Ads altogether. My site doesn’t have millions of visitors per month, hence it does not cost me a lot to maintain it. At the time, when I will be somehow noticed, I will gain a decent number of visitors, can imagine that I will be facing other opportunities to gain profit, and hopefully this will not be from Ads.
When I appreciate Ads system like EthicalAds, Privacy-preserving Ad Network or BuySellAds, there are still Ad systems that cause me a headache. If they annoy me, they annoy others as well.
On my devices, I am using Safari as my default browser. You may say what you like about it, but definitely, it’s not the new Internet Explorer.
I am using a dual approach. To preserve my privacy and to remove annoyances from the websites that I visit every day. Here is how I am doing that on my devices.
My site, until recently, was using a system font stack, mostly because I would like to have the lightest website possible.
My featured images, heavily optimized, still account for large LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) and adding custom fonts, in the most common way, can increase the overall weight of the website.
I am happy with my site, but on others, I need to use specified fonts to get the right visual experience across all user devices. In that case, I need to load additional fonts to accomplish that.
The fonts not only add weight to the website but also can hurt CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) if loaded incorrectly. As CLS is part of essential Core Web Vitals, its poor score can drop a website significantly in Google Search results.
Ironically, Google, on their Google Fonts website provides information (code) on how to implement the desired font in our website. The problem is, that their solution will have a huge negative impact on your website.
Not only they are loaded from an external source, but the speed of loading of your website and external fonts can also vary and cause, ironically, CLS, that Google will penalise you on.
A widely recommended method is to self-host your fonts (even these from Google). This, in most cases, may improve an impact on CLS, but not always. There are plenty of factors in how these fonts are delivered. If our hosting is poor and we are not using CDN (Content Delivery Network) then we can see worse results than loading fonts directly as Google advised.
Self-hosting fonts are the right approach, but it requires a couple of tweaks before it will work well for us in matters of web performance.
Let’s start with, how to load them correctly.
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