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Showing posts from October, 2018

Google's mobile-first indexing - what does it mean for me?

Google announced in March of 2018 that they would start migrating sites for mobile-first indexing. By now, presumably this process has been complete and mobile-first indexing is the standard for Google's crawlers. You most likely have received an email from Google that mobile-first indexing has been enabled for your site. What does this mean? Historically, Googlebot (Google's web crawler) has visited sites as if it were a desktop user, that is, a user with a relatively large screen with a mouse and a keyboard. With mobile-first indexing, Googlebot is now visiting sites first as a "mobile user" - small screen, no pointing device, touch screen, etc.) So to determine what your pages have to offer, it will first look at those pages as a smartphone, and then as a desktop device. Does this mean there are now separate indexes, one for mobile devices and one for desktops and laptops? No. Google will still use a single index but whatever a mobile user sees is

Bookmarklets for Yahoo Store

I was introduced to "bookmarklets" by my friend, Rob Snell, many years ago at one of the Yahoo Store conferences and they are indispensable tools in my daily work on Yahoo stores. What are "bookmarklets"? As the name suggests, bookmarklets are kind of like bookmarks in your browser, except instead of leading to a web page, they execute a small piece of JavaScript code on the current page. This is made possible by the browser's support of the "javascript:" prefix. When you point your browser to a URL, the browser figures out what to do with it: bring up a web page if the address starts with http:// or https://, connect to an ftp site if the address starts with ftp://, or in the case of javascript:, interpret and execute the JavaScript code following the colon. Typically, bookmarklets are saved either in your Favorites folder or if you use them on a daily basis like I do, in your browser's bookmarks toolbar. In essence, bookmarklets are sort