Updated Code for Google +1 Buttons

As reported last month, the code for Google +1 buttons could be improved so that the buttons load faster and stop blocking other resources. Google updated the code and recommends publishers to generate a new code.

"We're introducing a new asynchronous snippet, allowing you to make the +1 experience even faster. The async snippet allows your web page to continue loading while your browser downloads the +1 JavaScript. By loading these elements in parallel, we're ensuring the HTTP request to get the +1 button JavaScript doesn't lead to an increase in your page load time," explains Google.


Google also optimized the existing code so that the button renders up to 3 times faster. Even if you don't update the code, you'll still benefit from these changes.

The code generator is easy to use and I've noticed that a lot of sites added a +1 button next to Facebook's "Like" button. It's unfortunate that Google didn't optimize the code when it was released.

Google Webmaster Tools Promotion

Google displays a special ad if your query includes the site: operator, followed by a domain name: "Do you own domain.com? Get indexing and ranking data from Google."

Many webmasters use the site: operator to check the number of pages indexed by Google, so it's a good opportunity to promote Google Webmaster Tools.


This isn't a regular AdWords ad, since it's labeled as "Google promotion". From what I know, it's not even possible to create an AdWords campaign for all the searches that use the site: operator.

Google's Stats About the Web

Google has recently published a report about the Web, which includes a lot of interesting stats. The results were obtained from a sample of 4.2 billion web pages indexed by Google.

"The average web page takes up 320 KB on the wire (Google took into account the embedded resources such as images, scripts and stylesheets). Only two-thirds of the compressible material on a page is actually compressed. In 80% of pages, 10 or more resources are loaded from a single host."

The average number of images per page is 29.39 and the average size of all the images from a page is 205.99 KB. A web page includes an average of 7.09 external scripts and 3.22 external stylesheets. The average size of the scripts is 57.98 KB and the size of the stylesheets is 18.72 KB. Google also found that only 17 million pages from the sample use SSL (about 0.4%).

Urs Hölzle, Google's Senior Vice President of Operation, said that the average web page takes 4.9 seconds to load and it makes 44 calls to different resources. "Speed matters. The average web page isn't just big, it's complicated. Web pages aren't just HTML. A web page is a big ensemble of things, some of which must load serially," said Urs Hölzle.

Google offers a lot of tutorials that help web developers improve the performance of their websites. Google advises to use Gzip compression, use HTTP caching, optimize JavaScript code and properly combine scripts and stylesheets.

Google Browser Size

Google Browser Size is an experimental service that shows if a web page has interface elements that can't be viewed by a significant amount of people. "Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the 90% contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger."

The service can be used for any web page, but the data is obtained from the visitors of google.com. As you can see from the screenshot, Google's top result can be viewed by more than 99% of the visitors if no ad is displayed above the results.


Google Browser Size is one of the many Google tools that help you optimize web sites:

* Google Website Optimizer - testing and optimization tool
* Google Analytics - web analytics
* Google Webmaster Tools - site performance, crawl errors, top search queries
* Page Speed - an open-source Firebug add-on that helps you evaluate the performance of a web page.
* Speed Tracer - a Chrome extension that helps you fix performance problems in your web applications.
* Closure Compiler - a tool for making JavaScript download and run faster.
* "Let's make the web faster" tutorials.

{ Thanks, Kevin. }

Google Related Links, Second Edition

Google Related Links is a new Google Labs service that lets you add a list of related web pages and searches to your site. Unlike the homonymous service released by Google in 2006, the new Related Links restricts the results to your site.

"Related Links is a tool to help webmasters increase page views on their sites. Given a page on your site, Related Links can choose the most related pages from your site and show them in a gadget. You can embed this gadget in your page to help your users reach other pages easily. Related Links also suggests searches that users can run within your site to find even more related pages."

The service is not publicly available, but you can try a demo and ask for an invitation. "To apply for an invitation, please send an email to relatedlinks@google.com stating your Gmail address, website domains and approximate pageviews per day."

Once you get the invitation, log in using your Google account and click on "Manage Related Links". You'll be able to configure the gadget, customize the look and feel and enable some advanced features: highlighting the keywords from the page for visitors that come from a search engine, blacklisting web pages from the list of related links and removing prefixes or suffixes from titles.


After configuring the gadget, paste the code in one of your sites and test if it works well. If you edit the gadget's configuration, the changes are reflected instantly and you don't need to change the code.

Here's a screenshot that shows the related links and searches for a post about Google Voice.


The results are relevant, but there are some issues which show that the service is still in an early phase: there's an encoding bug when displaying page titles and links are only opened in a new window.

Sitemaps Shows Google Penalties For Your Site

Now that everyone can use Google Sitemaps, Google decided to transform Sitemaps into webmaster's corner. Matt Cutts informs that webmasters who use Sitemaps will get detailed information about penalties for their site. If your site doesn't follow Google's guidelines and uses hidden text, cloaking, doorway pages or sneaky redirects, it may be removed from the index. If you use Google Sitemaps, Google will confirm the penalty and offer you a reinclusion request specifically for that site.

Not everyone will get information about Google's penalties.

If the webspam team detects a spammer that is creating dozens or hundreds of sites with doorway pages followed by a sneaky redirect, there’s no reason that we’d want the spammer to realize that we’d caught those pages. So Google clearly shouldn’t contact every site that is penalized–it would tip off spammers that they’d been caught, and then the spammers would start over and try to be sneakier next time.

Everyone Can Use Google Sitemaps

Google introduced a new type of verification for Google Sitemaps: insert a meta tag in to the homepage of your site. The previous method (uploading a file to the server root) didn't work for Blogger users that host their blogs on BlogSpot.com.

You don't have to submit a sitemap for your site to use Google Sitemaps. If you prove you're the owner of the site (using the methods above), you can find interesting information: the top search queries - the queries that most often return pages from your site, top search query clicks - the top queries that direct traffic to your site, crawl statistics, PageRank distribution, crawl errors (this is a good way to detect bad links, HTTP errors).

If you have a blog on Blogger and can't host a sitemap for your blog, you can just submit your blog's feed to Google Sitemaps: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

A simple way to create a sitemap for your site online is using ROR Sitemap Generator. If you want to have a sitemap that updates dynamically, you have to install a web application on your server (PHP, ASP, ColdFusion).

PageRank Overlay: Webmaster Eyes

Webmaster Eyes is a site that offers you the chance to visualize PageRank values for every link in a webpage. It's interesting to know what kind of sites someone links to, although PageRank isn't an absolute criterion for the quality of a site.

Webmaster Eyes overlays a site with small bars that indicate PageRank, in a similar way with Google Analytics' site overlay. If you click on a green bar, you'll navigate to the link next to the PageRank bar.


It's useful to use Webmaster Eyes with search results, sitemaps (to see PageRank distribution on internal pages) or not-very-familiar sites to see popular articles or blog posts.

To make it easier to access the site, bookmark this link (it's a simple bookmarklet that works in Explorer, Firefox, Opera).

Another way to use Webmaster Eyes is to install Google Toolbar 4 (Internet Explorer only). After that, go to webmastereyes.com, right-click on the search bar and select "Create Custom Search" from the menu. From now on, enter the URLs in the Google search box instead of the address bar and click the button you've just created. If you already visit a site, copy the address from the address bar to Google Toolbar search box and click Webmaster Eyes button. Note that the URL must start with [http://].

Related:
Check link popularity
Google sandbox and TrustRank algorithm
The future of search