I seem to be on a roll, nitpicking Google’s public pronouncements on SEO. After my last article on the SEO impact of cloaking affiliate links, I told myself I’d stay away from the subject for a while, but then couldn’t help myself as John Mueller said something that quietly upended the entire foundation of search. […]
Cloaking Affiliate Links Doesn’t Harm SEO!
A bit of a discussion broke out over the weekend on the issue of affiliate links and their impact on SEO. An SEO consultant asked John Mueller whether his site was harmed because he was cloaking his affiliate links. Mueller’s answer was a dodge: But taken together with previous pronouncements and common sense, cloaking your […]
How To Use QUIC.cloud’s Name Servers For Full CDN Integration
Right now, QUIC.cloud is the best Cloudflare alternative. While it still has a long way to go to match Cloudflare’s extensive feature set, the basic functionality of a reverse proxy is already up and running. And the pricing model is far more flexible than Cloudflare’s, where the minimum plan costs $20/m. By contrast, QUIC.cloud has […]
Google’s “Helpful Content” Update: Will It Fix Things?
Those who rely on search for our traffic know that the phrase “Content is King” in search is a lie. The crown doesn’t go to content but to something Google claims doesn’t exist – domain authority. We know that big brands always get away with thin, poor-quality content, while smaller brands with better articles rank […]
Spam Google Analytics Hits: Czechia And Seychelles
For the past week or so, Google Analytics has been showing inflated stats for several of my pages. A while back, I’d written about fake traffic in Google Analytics from visitors that weren’t coming to your site. I don’t know whether the perpetrators finally stopped or whether their tactics were blocked by Google. But the […]
Search CTR: Google Says It Doesn’t Affect Rankings. Really?
No one – probably not even Google’s search engineers – understands all the factors that go into ranking search results. Particularly with the integration of AI, I’m convinced that even the people who built the system no longer know what goes into determining which results show up in which position, let alone the respective weightings. […]
QUIC.cloud Has New Security Features
I’m a huge admirer of QUIC.cloud, and they currently fill a need that I think is met only by Cloudflare. Cloudflare is, of course, a lot more mature and has more features, but QUIC.cloud is filling out its feature set nicely. One of the biggest advantages of a Cloudflare Pro is the Web Application Firewall […]
Why I Don’t Use AWS S3 For Website Backups
I’m constantly trying to find better backup solutions for my website. While I lucked out and got grandfathered into a cheap DropMySite plan for 10 GB, DropMySite has since changed its pricing, and it’s no longer suitable for ordinary website hosting. I’ve been looking into Amazon’s AWS S3 for backups, and since Cloudflare introduced R2 […]
How To Add A “Vary: Accept-Encoding” Header To Apache
I freely admit to finding the “Vary” response header confusing. I know that it controls caching and can take various values such as “Cookie”, “Referrer”, and many other values. I know that it controls the behavior of the cache and that having a messy “Vary” response header can have a terrible impact on cache times. […]
Managed vs Unmanaged VPS: The NameHero Difference
NameHero’s “Managed Cloud” service is a VPS that NameHero manages for you, so you can focus your attention on your website instead of dealing with the headaches of server management. While NameHero doesn’t offer unmanaged VPS servers, many other web hosts do. In this article, let’s look at what separates unmanaged from managed VPS servers […]