Uncompressed site - Google traffic doubled

[Stereo Steve]

I read a thread on here the other day about compression and I think it was Malc who suggested there was a reason why G liked uncompressed sites but couldn't remember why. So I think around the 25th I decided to uncompress and upload as a trial. By the 1st, traffic from G organic search had doubled to an all time high and the amount of pages in the main index quadrupled almost overnight. Plus total indexed pages went up 25%. There has been an impressive increase in sales as well.

May all be co-incidental but I thought I'd mention it. Would be interested in anyone else's experience of this. If your site is compressed, why not give uncompressed a go and watch analytics for a couple weeks?

[completerookie]

google, like other search engines will read your web pages one line at a time, trying to de-cypher them.
If it encounters an error on the line, it ignores the "line" and moves on to the next one.

when you run compressed output, all the html is effectively put on "one line" (all the irrelevent spaces and carriage returns are removed)
the net result of this, is that if google encounters and error partway through reading the "single compressed line", it ignores the remaining, moves on and effectively finishes the page.

if you do not compress, every line is individual, any error and only that small line is ignored and the remaining lines are hopefully interpreted,

It would be great if actinic could give us a "semi compressed" output whereby each line is preserved but all redundant carriage-returns are removed and any empty "white spaces" (tabs and spaces) are removed at the beginning of any line.

[Stereo Steve]

So, is it worth going through your layouts and removing all the blank lines?

[completerookie]

do not confuse google analysing your web site with the physical size of the html page. google doesn't really worry about extra line feeds, its just that when it encounters the error, it ignores the rest of the line, and gets on with the next, if all your page is "one line", then you don't get a second bite of the cherry if you've got an error early on in the line.

removing lines and spaces is all about the size of the page being served, each extra character you can remove, is one less to serve, one less to download, and potentially a quicker displaying of the web page.

I peronally think that actinic should do this job. its not a difficult process,
the problem is that actinic, for instance, generates a blank line for each condition (and end of condition), so if you have 40 conditions that are not met, then you end up with 80 extra blank lines (one for the start, one for the end)
internally, within the html file, you end up with 1 character for a "carriage return" and one character for the "line feed" - (depending if its on windows or unix) - net result is that you end up with potentially 160 extra characters that you download each time - and thats just the unused actinic conditions.

when you start to play with the tabs and spaces we are all guilty of using, the extra characters mount up. Having said that, for readability, maintainability, I always use tabs (thats one character) instead of spaces, I also use CrLf's (carriage return/line feeds) so I can at least read the darned code.

There is no easy way to have actinic run a semi-compressed code generator, you could run external html compressors, but of course, actinic generates and uploads in one in one hit.

there's lots of other ways to speed up the display of your web pages, but this thread is more about "uncompressed pages" rather than "speed of displaying your pages"

[RuralWeb]

thanks for the mention Steve as it was me who posted about it. At least it shows that some of us know what we are talking about and are not seo scam merchants.

[Mike Hughes]

Crikey. Nice one Malc. I hadn't even thought of this before but can see how it could cause problems. I've now changed one of my sites and will be watching to see what happens.

Steve, one thing you might find is that Google is seeing all the changes as an indication of freshness. It'll be interesting to see if any boost to the rankings is permanent or tails off after a few days.

Mike

[RuralWeb]

There are lots of similar tricks you can do with actinic which is one of the reasons I still use it.

[dave_finlayson]

Think it was me who asked that question!

We run our site uncompressed now and have seen a definate rise in visits since we did it. Unless you are on all but the crappest bandwidth limits then I really don't see the need to run compressed these days anyway.

[Stereo Steve]

Tonight, 10 more pages come out of supplemental and into the main index. Maybe a temporary thing. I should say that we recently went from Executive to Hotshot about a month ago but it looks pretty similar in terms of code.

The only other big thing we changed was to move the best sellers to the right margin (one reason for going to hotshot) also about a month ago. We felt that having identical content on the left margin on every page was not good for SEO. Having it on the right means google still picks up the links and we get the marketing benefits but it sees the content first.

So, either of those could be partially or full responsible as well. It's just the timing, it's almost a direct reaction!

[RuralWeb]

There is a very good reason why best sellers etc should be on the right. Think about how g reads the page and you will understand.

[Stereo Steve]

Just edited my post to explain the reason for the move and then saw yours after it.

[Stereo Steve]

I note that Actinic Express sites are uncompressed by default. Isn't it time Actinic defaulted the main software to uncompressed and left this as an option?

[gabrielcrowe]

<twopence>

google, like other search engines will read your web pages one line at a time, trying to de-cypher them.
If it encounters an error on the line, it ignores the "line" and moves on to the next one.

sorry, but i dont think this is strictly true.

Google uses regular expressions to evaluate the code within tags. their text extraction algo is based on good code, and not the lines its on. html has no real need for whitespace, and so linebreaks and such are treat no different than flowing single line code. Google uses python, that reads by the byte, not by the line.

The reason your code comes up higher is more likely to be the 'humanisation' of it. The big G likes human created pages, and not generated pages, and by 'compression' of the page, you're removing the human element of readability.

The Actinic compression algo. is not as configurable as we want it to be. In light of this discovery, I SERIOUSLY suggest that the following options be implemented in the compress html methods (that i have suggested before btw):

- remove/keep comments
- remove keep whitespace
- remove/keep linebreaks
- strip double line breaks (similar to outlook, trimming extra linebreaks)
- keep conditional headers and strip all other comments
- force all tags to lower case
- enable disable nested tag checking (move to this standard dialogue from options)
- run/dont run all code through htmltidy
- compress and or encrypt html

...are some of the things i feel would benefit EVERYONE looking for better natural SEO (apart from compression and encryption, obviously).

</twopence>

[toystoyou]

Sorry to sound a bit 'thick' but how do you uncompress your Actinic site?
Do you have to manually remove all the spaces in the html code or is there a button you can press that'll do it all in one go?
Julie
www.toys-to-you.co.uk
Affordable ethical and Fairtrade childrens toys

[Mark H]

Version 7:

Design Options / Miscellaneous / Generation Options, untick "Compact HTML/CGI".

Version 8/9:

Design Options / Generation, untick "Compact HTML/CGI".