Will One Line Of Code Help Your SEO?

There's been quite a lot of discussion online (and a little offline) about a recent blog article called: How I Sped Up My Site 68.35% With One Line of Code

I think the biggest buzz about this article has been in the SEO community, who suddenly got all excited about a magical way to speed up web pages. Mentioned by Moz (the organic optimisation industry's catnip) you could be fooled into thinking that one person had suddenly found a way to massively boost a site to the top of the results pages.
Note: For those who don't know, the speed a page downloads is cited as one of the numerous factors taken into consideration when search engines such as Google rank (judge) your site... having a much faster page load speed with just one little line of code would be fabulous.
But alas, that's not the case.

You see, I think this article is misleading as it explains how to use an HTML tag called "rel-prerender".

For those who don't know, the rel-prerender tag is used on a website to place into computer memory the next page the site developer expects the users to click on. For example, Google sometimes use it in their search engine results pages (SERPs) to make the experience of clicking on the first result much quicker.

To explain how this works on your own website, let's imagine you are on page 1 and want to automatically call-up page 2 behind the scenes (so that it appears very quickly). You therefore insert the "rel-prerender" tag in page 1 to call up page 2 before it is clicked on.

Where might you use this?
Well you might us it on a login-page (page 1) where the logged-in page (page 2) is usually the next step. You can even use it in an eCommerce site to pre-render the shopping cart I guess.... BTW: DO NOT DO THIS!

But as you would expect, there's a catch. Pre-rendering page 2 is the act of requesting a view of it in advance. So people arriving on page 1 can trigger a page 2 view without ever seeing it and in many cases they won't. This means that in some analytic packages this is recorded as a page impression (not in GA, it's clever like that) and ads on that page may be triggered even when nobody's there to see them. Plus it also adds load onto your servers whenever a page is requested, so don't tell your tech support person you're adding further load onto the system that may never be used.

So does it have an effect on SEO? Well I may be wrong.... but I really can't see how it helps organic site optimisation as you are not speeding up the render of the page you want to appear in the SERPs (Page 1). What you are actually doing is speeding up the potential delivery of the next page (page 2) you expect the user to see.  And that's not SEO, that's a caching strategy.

Is this the best 'Page Not Found' message?

The web was originally created for the purpose of linking between different locations using hyperlinks within pages. This is still the case now, only these days there a lot of broken links out there as pages change their locations over time (e.g. when a new site is built or when products are no longer available to buy online). Consequently now and then you're bound to run into the odd 'Page Not Found' message as you browse around.

This is sometimes called a "404 error", as this is the official server code created when a web server can't find the page requested. And typically this 404 error page generates a dull computer-created message that looks completely out of place on your newly-designed digital masterpiece.

However, it's not often you come across such as page that makes you giggle. I'll therefore leave it up to you to decide if this 404 message from baby & toddler retailer Mothercare is actually the best example out there.

Above the fold?

"Out of sight out of mind"

It's a pretty blunt saying, but for me it kinda sums up my thoughts about the 'fold'....that part of any web page that you have to scroll below to read stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Above_the_fold

And although we now have a generation of smartphone users who are accustomed to scrolling with their thumbs, I still believe users on PC's and tablets are less likely to scroll to content below the fold as it means they have to carry out another action.

Jakob Nielson also agrees with me:

Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.

Obviously this topic is entirely subjective and a lot has to do with the user experience and design of the page. Plus there are now a LOT of different screen resolutions out there, meaning that content pushed entirely off of one screen could well be sat in the middle of someone else's. On top of this, a lot of people think that fold issues are a myth.....

But a recent Google update may make more of a difference to those interested in the benefit of the fold, especially those with more advertising at the top of the page. Now Google have updated their Page Layout algorithm, which is designed to reward sites with content, rather than ads, above the fold.
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2216227/Google-Updates-Above-the-Fold-Page-Layout-Algorithm

Is the concept of a page now defunct ?

The page is a metaphor that has existed since the web began. It's a simple device that allows users to navigate around the Internet easily and provides a unique location for each individual piece of content & functionality. Big sites have a lot of pages and even bigger sites have loads, that was the way of the web.

However, there are several current trends that could see the end of the page paradigm as we know it:

1. Parametised search

Have you ever gone to a major ecommerce site (e.g. www.johnlewis.com) and started to browse their catalogue of products? If so, then you may have noticed that the multi-select options, typically shown down the side, allow you to repeatedly filter your choices. In a lot of cases this doesn't refresh the page, but just redisplays the available products in the main viewing area. 

2. Browser address bar prominence

As browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox have developed over the years, the actual address bar showing the URL has become less prominent. So much so that for a lot of users, this once obvious feature is now relegated to a small letterbox more useful as a way of seeing if a site is secure (using https and sometimes turning green to depict an extra level of security). Conspiracy theorists may say this is a ploy by the browser makers of reducing our dependency on URLs as a way of navigating the world wide web, however I think it's just a natural move to provide more screen real estate and a sign of how the address bar has become less used (perhaps as we now follow more links from Social sourced?).

3. Constant scrolling 

If you use sites like Twitter and LinkedIn you will notice that you no longer have to click 'next page' or anything similar when you get to the bottom of the page you are on. Instead the next set of tweets, timelines, results, etc. automatically appear. This use of clever results that display more when you need them may seem useful, but what if every site did it? Would you ever need more than one page of results? 

And more to the point.... What if Google and other search engines now did this? 

(For one thing, it would certainly make the client demand of "get me on the first page of Google" far easier to achieve)