May | 2010 | Passionate Testing

Nati Shalom discusses in one of his latest blog entries the changes Google made to its page ranking algorithm and how it influences your Google page ranking.

Last month Google added Website speed to its site ranking algorithm: It’s Official: Google Now Counts Site Speed As A Ranking Factor… The rationale behind this move by Google is fairly straightforward:

Slow web sites lead to a poor user experience, and therefore should not appear at the top of the search list even if they contain relevant content.

This emphasizes once more the influence of performance on your daily business. A simple change to your site can now affect your entire page ranking and how users find your content. Continuous performance testing is now even more important than ever.

Just read about a nice small software problem at Opera. Their latest browser is version 10, but they couldn’t continue to use the version number in the user agent string, because some web sites try to identify the agent version and fail with 2 digit version numbers. Seems to be similar to the famous Y2K problem, but now it is a BVN problem – a browser version number problem.

“…It appears that a considerable amount of browser sniffing scripts are not quite ready for this change to double digits, as they detect only the first digit of the user agent string: in such a scenario, Opera 10 is interpreted as Opera 1. This results in sites mistakenly identifying Opera 10 as an unsupported browser, thereby breaking server, as well as client-side scripts…”

Passionate Testing

Monthly Archives: May 2010

Speed matters for your ranking

One digit version numbers only, please!