Google has released its third major operating system, Fuchsia OS, although most people probably missed it.
Google has been working on Fuchsia OS for several years. The OS is an all-new undertaking, built from the ground up, without being based on Linux, UNIX or any other OS. The company has been unusually secretive about the project, leading many to conclude it could bring together the company’s OS strategy, eventually replacing both Android and Chrome.
One of the factors in Fuchsia’s favor is Flutter, the programming language used for it. Because Flutter creates cross-platform apps, apps that are created now will be able to automatically run on any Fuchsia-powered devices once they debut.
It appears Google has finally released Fuchsia, although to an existing device, rather than an all-new device, or as part of a wider release. According to 9to5Google, Fuchsia has been rolled out to the first-generation Nest Hub, replacing the Linux-based OS the devices were previously running.
Google confirmed to 9to5Google there will not be any fundamental change in the device’s behavior. Nonetheless, Fuchsia running on a real-world device will give the company valuable input on how well the OS is functioning, and what improvements need to be made before a wider deployment.
China may be on the verge of completely banning cryptocurrency mining, a move that would be a serious blow to crypto.
It’s estimated that China accounts for 70% of the world’s crypto supply, and as much as 75% of Bitcoin mining. In spite of the country’s role in crypto’s rise, the Chinese government is increasingly cracking down on operations.
Last week, China began signaling it was cracking down on cryptocurrency, saying its volatility “seriously violate people’s asset safety.” The government now appears poised to crack down, not just on trading crypto, but on mining it as well, marking an escalation of Beijing’s anti-crypto rhetoric.
According to the South China Morning Post, the State Council’s Financial Stability and Development Committee issued a statement saying the government plans to “crack down on bitcoin mining and trading behaviour, and resolutely prevent the transfer of individual risks to the society.”
The statement is a shot across the bow at the entire Chinese crypto mining industry, and could have profound repercussions.
“The wording of the statement did not leave much leeway for cryptocurrency mining,” said Li Yi, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences chief research fellow, according to South China Morning Post.
Needless to say, Bitcoin’s price was down on the news.
Author holds a very, very (almost infinitesimally) small amount of Bitcoin that in no way influenced this article.
Qualcomm has released the Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 processor to help further Arm-based Windows PCs, as well as Chromebooks.
Apple upended the PC industry when it announced it would switch its Mac computers to its own custom silicon. Apple’s new M1 processors are the evolution of the same Arm-based chips Apple has used in iPhones and iPads for years. Shortly after the announcement, former Apple executive and Be, Inc. founder Jean-Louis Gassée predictedMicrosoft would be forced to follow suit, due to the advantages Arm’s architecture offers over Intel.
Qualcomm is working hard to help the Windows and Chromebook world embrace Arm-based chips with its new Snapdragon 7c Gen 2.
“Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 brings the leading innovations of our compute portfolio to the next generation of entry-tier and affordable devices. Laptops powered by this platform will redefine mobile computing for education users, first line workers, and everyday light consumers, enabling reliable and powerful devices that feature advanced AI, and support for multi-day battery life,” said Miguel Nunes, Senior Director, Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We are excited to bring this next generation upgrade to our entry level platform, for the very best mobile PC experiences.”
Qualcomm has simultaneously released Snapdragon Developer Kit, aimed at helping developers test their Windows 10 applications on the Arm-based chips.
“We have a proud history of creating helpful developer tools in coordination with Microsoft, and the Snapdragon Developer Kit is the latest outcome of that collaboration,” said Miguel Nunes, Senior Director, Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “This developer kit provides an affordable alternative to other consumer and commercial devices. With the smaller desktop configuration, this kit gives developers more flexibility than notebook options, and at a lower price point. We remain committed to helping developers address requests from customers, while reducing the overall cost of deployment.”
Google News Showcase has made its way to the desktop, continuing the company’s efforts to change how it interacts with news publishers.
Google News Showcase is the company’s platform that pays publishers to work with Google’s news products. The product has already been launched in the U.K., Australia, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Czechia and India, backed by a $1 billion fund. The platform was pivotal to Google smoothing things over with Australia when it passed legislation to force tech companies to pay for news.
The product has now moved beyond mobile and made its way to the desktop. Alex Cox, Product Manager, News made the announcement in a company blog post.
“Today, we’re announcing a few new features for News Showcase. First, we’re rolling out News Showcase for desktop users of Google News (via news.google.com/showcase). Now every user of Google News, regardless of what device they’re using, can see enhanced story panels from our News Showcase partners. This feature is available in the eight countries where we’ve currently launched News Showcase.”
Cox also reiterated the company’s commitment to supporting journalism.
“News Showcase is just one part of Google’s overall commitment to the news industry. We partner with news publishers through the Google News Initiative, offer innovative products like Subscribe with Google to help them earn sustainable revenue, and build tools like those in Journalist Studio to help make it simpler and more affordable to uncover and write stories. High-quality journalism is important to us, to our users and to society as a whole, and we’re dedicated to ensuring a positive future with our products and investments.”
Verizon is offering subscribers free Apple Arcade or Google Play Pass in its ongoing efforts to be the center of customers’ digital life.
Carriers are increasingly expanding beyond basics wireless service, offering promotions, complimentary services and partnerships. The goal is to help reduce churn — the rate at which customers switch carriers — by becoming entrenched in customers’ lives.
For example, T-Mobile offers T-Mobile Money banking service and T-Mobile Home Internet, as well as free Netflix. Meanwhile, some Verizon plans include free Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+, as well as free Apple Music and Discovery+.
Verizon is expanding its bundled services to include a free Apple Arcade or Google Play Pass plan.
Starting May 25, new and existing customers get six months of Apple Arcade or Google Play Pass, ($4.99/mo. value) on us with any unlimited plan or 12 months on us with “Play More” or “Get More” plans.
Duplicate content is like a virus. When a virus enters your system, it begins to replicate itself until it is ready to be released and cause all kinds of nasty havoc within your body. On the web, a little duplicate content isn’t a huge problem, but the more it replicates itself, the bigger the problem you’re going to have. Too much duplicate content and your website will come down with some serious health issues.
I’m going to break this into three parts. In this post, I’ll discuss the problems that are caused with duplicate content. In Part II, I’ll address the causes of duplicate content, and in Part III, I’ll discuss some duplicate content elimination solutions.
Duplicate Content Causes Problems. Duh!
Google and other search engines like to tell us that they have the duplicate content issue all figured out. And, in the cases where they don’t, they provide a couple of band-aid solutions for you to use (we’ll get to these later). While there may be no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty”, there are certainly filters in place in the search engine algorithms that devalue content that is considered duplicate, and make your site as a whole less valuable in the eyes of the search engines.
If you trust the search engines to handle your site properly, and don’t mind having important pages filtered out of the search results, then go ahead and move on to another story… you got nothing to worry about.
Too many pages to index
Theoretically, there is no limit to the number of pages on your site that the search engines can add to their index. In practice, though, if they find too much “junk”, they’ll stop spidering pages and move on to the next site. They may come back and keep grabbing content they missed, but likely at a much slower pace than they otherwise would.
Duplicate content, in practice, creates “junk” pages. Not that they may not have value, but compared to the one or two or dozen other pages on your site or throughout the web that also contain the same content, there really isn’t anything unique there for the search engines to care about. It’s up to the engines to decide which pages are the unnecessary pages and which is the original source or most valuable page to include in the search results.
The rest is just clutter that the search engines would rather not have.
Slows search engine spidering
With so many duplicate pages to sort through, the search engines tire easily. Instead of indexing hundreds of pages of unique content, they are left sifting through thousands of pages of some original content and a whole lot of duplicate crap. Yeah, you’d tire too!
Once the engines get a whiff that a site is overrun with dupes, the spidering process will often be reduced to a slow crawl. Why rush? There are plenty of original sites out there they can be gathering information on. Maybe they’ll find a few good nuggets or two on your site, but it can wait, as long as they are finding gold mines elsewhere.
Splits valuable link juice
When there is more than one page (URL) on your site that carries the same content as another there becomes an issue of which page gets the links. In practice, whichever URL the visitor lands on and bookmarks, or passes on via social media, is the page that gets the link value. But, each visitor may land on a different URL with that same content.
If 10 people visit your site, 5 land on and choose to link to one URL, while the other 5 land on and choose to link to the other (both being the same content), instead of having one page that has 10 great links, you have 2 pages each with half the linking value. Now imagine you have 5 duplicate pages and the same scenario happens. Instead of 10 links going to a single page, you may end up with 2 links going to each of the 5 duplicate versions.
So, for each duplicate page on your site, you are cutting the link value that any one of the pages could achieve. When it comes to rankings, this matters. In our second scenario, all it takes, essentially, is a similarly optimized page with 3 links to outrank your page with only 2. Not really fair, because the same content really has 10 links, but it’s your own damn fault for splitting up your link juice like that.
Inaccessible pages
We talked above about how duplicate content slows spidering leaving, some content out of the search engine’s index. Leaving duplicate content aside for a moment, let’s consider the page URLs themselves. We’ve all seen those URLs that are so long and complicated that you couldn’t type one out if it was dictated to you. While not all of these URLs are problematic, some of them certainly can be. Not to mention URLs that are simply undecipherable as being unique pages.
We’ll talk more about these URLs in part 3, but for now, let’s just consider what it means when a URL cannot be spidered by the search engines. Well, simply put, if the search engines can’t spider it, then it won’t get indexed. The browser may pull open a page the visitors can see, but the search engines get nothin’. And when you multiply that nothin’ the search engines get with the nothin’ they’ll show in the results (don’t forget to carry the nothin’), you get a whole lot of nothin’ going on.
Pages inaccessible to the search engines means those pages can’t act as landing pages in the search results. That’s OK, if it’s a useless page, but not if it’s something of value that you want to be driving traffic to.
There are a lot of problems caused by duplicate content and bad URL development. These problems may be minor or cataclysmic, depending on the site. Either way, small problem or large, it’s probably a good idea to figure out the cause of your duplicate content problems so you can begin to implement solutions that will pave the way for better search engine rankings.
Is your unoptimized website bleeding money due to a slow average page load time? This guide will show you how to optimize your .htaccess (apache) file to implement speed improvements.
Just a one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions, and 40% of users abandon shopping carts that takes more than 3 seconds to load, according to KissMetrics. With more users making purchase decisions on mobile devices each year, page load optimization won’t patiently wait on your back burner any longer without affecting your bottom line.
Fortunately, there are several effective tactics to speed up your website without even touching your main website code. Even if you have little experience with .htaccess or server modification, this detailed guide will give you the tools and knowledge to take a bite out of your page load.
What is .htaccess?
Glad you asked. An .htaccess file allows you to modify Apache web server configuration settings without modifying the main configuration file – in other words, you can customize the way the server behaves while keeping the core settings intact, much like using a child theme in WordPress. Most webhosts allow clients to use .htaccess files, but if you’re not sure, check with your host.
How Do You Use .htaccess? Simply open any text editor and create a new file called .htaccess. Could it really be that simple? Well, yes and no. Most likely, your computer will perceive the .htaccess file as an operating-system file and hide it from view. To see the file, you’ll need to follow a guide like this one from SitePoint to show hidden files. Once you have that taken care of, you’re ready to move on!
Some considerations before you start: When editing .htaccess files, minor mistakes in syntax can break your site. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to back up any existing .htaccess files (if applicable) before you begin editing. If necessary, you can comment out an existing line by using the # symbol at the beginning.
Some of the common ways an .htaccess file can get broken:
Bad syntax – in other words, improperly formatting the code.
If you make .htaccess edits through cPanel, they can conflict with changes you made by hand.
With the proper precautions and a reliable source to copy and paste code from, there’s no reason not to take advantage of .htaccess to improve your site.
7 Tricks for Improving Site Speed with .htaccess
On to the good part: how can we harness the power of .htaccess to improve page load time? Try one (or all!) of these 7 tried-and-true customizations:
Turn on content caching Google recommends caching all static (permanent) resources – including Javascript, CSS, media files, images, and more. Caching saves these resources to the user’s local memory so files don’t need to be downloaded for repeat visits. This modification alone can significantly reduce page load time – not to mention bandwidth usage.
While some servers will cache a few static resources by default, it’s best to explicitly tell your server to cache all of them. More importantly, the default expiration period for cached entities is one hour, while Google recommends a minimum of one month, and even up to one year (but no more than that).
To ensure the server is caching all static resources and for the maximum time recommended by Google, we’ll be using mod_expires. Open .htaccess and paste the following inside:
# Set up caching on static resources for 1 year based on Google recommendations <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On <FilesMatch "\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav|js|css|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$"> ExpiresDefault A29030400 </FilesMatch> </IfModule>
You see whether it’s working by viewing the headers for a file on your server. Using Chrome, open the developer tool and go to the Network tab. Reload your page and click on a css file. Make sure you see the expires date in the response headers:
Compress output with gzip This .htaccess modification compresses the size of the resources as they’re being downloaded to the user’s browser, thereby increasing page load. By default, it won’t compress anything below 500 bytes — which is a good thing, because compression below that size can ironically increase load time.
To utilize this mod, copy and paste the code below into your .htaccess file:
Turn off directory indexing This mod hits two birds with one stone, improving speed and privacy.
By default, any visitor can actually look inside any directory that doesn’t have an index file (index.html, index.php, etc.) in it. That means configuration files and other sensitive data could potentially be up for grabs to malicious users.
Unless you want to add a blank index.html file to every folder on your website (and trust future developers to do the same), take the easy road and modify your .htaccess file instead. In the process, you’ll be saving a bit of server resources – especially if you have very large directories. To turn off directory indexing, open your .htaccess file and add:
#Disable Directory Indexes Options -Indexes
Prevent hotlinking Have you ever had the option to display an image from another website via URL? That’s called hotlinking, and it actually eats up bandwidth on the host’s server. Thankfully, it’s possible to prevent other domains from hotlinking to your website. To ensure nobody is using your precious bandwidth, add this script to your .htaccess file:
#Prevent Hot Linking RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomain.com [NC] RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [NC,F,L]
Force files to download instead of open in browser If your site serves a lot of media files, speed is a top priority. If it’s practical for your users to download files to their hard drives once rather than stream repeatedly from your website, this mod will save your bandwidth:
#Force certain types of files to download instead of load in browser #Only include filetypes that you want to download automatically AddType application/octet-stream .csv AddType application/octet-stream .xls AddType application/octet-stream .doc AddType application/octet-stream .avi AddType application/octet-stream .mpg AddType application/octet-stream .mov AddType application/octet-stream .pdf
Deny bad bots Your public website is constantly being crawled and scraped by bots. Some of these bots are essential – they index your site so it will show in search results. However, there are plenty of bots that aren’t so friendly. Spam bots and scrapers might be bogging down your server, using up bandwidth and resources.. We can block bots based on the user-agent they provide.
The script below denies some bad bots, but isn’t exhaustive. Look to AskApache for resources to help identify more bad bots to block, and use our script as a template if you prefer to add more:
You can test to see that it’s working by changing your user-agent in Google Chrome. In the developer tools, go to Settings->Overrides->Useragent. Setting your Useragent to one of the blocked bots, then visit your site. You should get a 403 denied error.
Deny malicious IPs Nothing slows down a site quite like a server attack. If you know the IP address of a user who is trying to break into or abuse your website, you can deny a specific IP, IP blocks, or domains with .htaccess:
#Deny Malicious IPs order allow,deny
#deny single IP deny from 1.1.1.1
#deny IP block deny from 1.1.1.
allow from all
Putting It All Together
Eager to use every tool possible to speed up your site in .htaccess? We put everything together for you here:
#Block Bad Bots – This is a small list. You can add bots to it. RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WebBandit [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^2icommerce [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Accoona [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^ActiveTouristBot [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^addressendeutshland RewriteRule ^.* – [F,L] </IfModule>
# Set up caching on static resources for 1 year based on Google recommendations <IfModule mod_expires.c> ExpiresActive On <FilesMatch “\.(flv|ico|pdf|avi|mov|ppt|doc|mp3|wmv|wav|js|css|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|swf)$”> ExpiresDefault A29030400 </FilesMatch> </IfModule>
Following the Google’s Panda slap, now Bing reasserts it’s stand for quality content as well.
When we think of quality content, Google Search is our the first automated response. However, to reinstate it’s position, Bing’s, Duane Forrester’s blog gives webmasters some tips and tricks to creating quality content to ensure that both the users and the search engines respond to your website.
Unlike Google, that has left webmasters across the globe in murky waters of Reconsider Request, Bing seems to provide us with rather quick and easy to follow pointers that will easily make their crawler conclude that your website has quality content.
Following are the steps Bing suggests you avoid whilst producing content:
“Duplicate content” – don’t use articles or content that appear in other places. Produce your own unique content.
Thin content – don’t produce pages with little relevant content on them – go deep when producing content – think “authority” when building your pages. Ask yourself if this page of content would be considered an authority on the topic.
All text/All images – work to find a balance here, including images to help explain the content, or using text to fill in details about images on the page. Remember that text held inside an image isn’t readable by the crawlers.
Being lonely – enable ways for visitors to share your content through social media.
Translation tools – rarely does a machine translation tool leave you with content that reads properly and that actually captures the original sentiment. Avoid simply using a tool to translate content from one language to the next and posting that content online.
Skipping proofreading – when you are finished producing content, take the time to check for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and for the overall flow when reading. Does it sound like you’re repeating words too frequently? Remove them. Don’t be afraid to rewrite the content, either.
Long videos – If you produce video content, keep it easily consumable. Even a short 3 – 4 minute video can be packed with useful content, so running a video out to 20 minutes is poor form in most instances. It increases download times and leads to visitor dissatisfaction at having to wait for the video to load. Plus, if you are adding a transcription of your video, even a short video can produce a lengthy transcription.
Excessively long pages – if your content runs long, move it to a second page. Readers need a break, so be careful here to balance the length of your pages. Make sure your pagination solution doesn’t cause other issues for your search optimization efforts, though.
Content for content’s sake – if you are producing content, be sure its valuable. Don’t just add text to every page to create a deeper page. Be sure the text, images or videos are all relevant to the content of the page.”
When looking to optimize your website this comprehensive list of ‘don’t’ seems like a good place to start from. However, some skeptics may question the reason behind Bing emphasis on quality at this juncture; is this guide any early indication towards Bing’s version of Google like Panda update? Hmmm…
Sitemaps are an ingredient that completes a website’s SEO package. They are certainly still relevant, since they ensure content is not overlooked by web crawlers and reduce the resource burden on search engines. Sitemaps are a way to “spoon feed” search engines your content to ensure better crawling. Let’s look at how this is done.
XML Format
The sitemap file is what search engines look for. The elements available to an XML sitemap are defined by the sitemap protocol and include urlset, url, loc, lastmod, changefreq, and priority. An example DOM looks like:
http://example.com/
2006-11-18
daily
0.8
Sitemaps have a 10 MB size limit and cannot have more than 50,000 links, but you can use more than one file for the sitemap. A sitemap that consists of multiple files is called a sitemap index. Sitemap index files have a similar, but different format:
There are all kinds of sitemaps, ones for web pages, ones tailored to sites with videos and other media, mobile, geo data, and more. As long as it is within the cost-benefit for achieving better SEO, take the time to become familiar with the different types of sitemaps and make one that best fits your website’s architecture.
Location
Sitemaps can be named anything, but convention is that a sitemap will be named ‘sitemap.xml’ and is placed in the root of the site, so http://example.com/sitemap.xml. If multiple files are needed they can be named ‘sitemap1.xml’ and ‘sitemap2.xml’. Sitemap files can also be compressed, such as ‘sitemap.gz’. One can also have sitemaps in sub directories or submit them for multiple domains, but the cases for needing such are very limited.
Submission
Sitemaps are recognized by search engines in three ways:
First, sitemaps can be specified in the robots.txt as follows: Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml
The robots.txt file is then placed in the root of the domain, http://example.com/robots.txt, and when crawlers read the file they will find the sitemap and use it to improve their understanding of the website’s layout.
Second, search engines can be notified through “ping” requests, such as: http://searchengine.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fsitemap.xml
These “ping” requests are a standard way search engines allow websites to notify them of updated content. Obviously, the domain (i.e. “searchengine.com”) will be replaced with say “google.com”.
Lastly, every major search engine has a submission tool for notifying the engine that a website’s sitemap has changed. Here are four major search engines and their submission URLs:
Google – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=
The ping requests do not respond with any information besides whether or not the request was received. The submission URLs will respond with information about the sitemap, such as any errors it found.
If your website uses WordPress or the like, there are great plugins such as Google XML Sitemaps which will do all this heavy work for you: creating sitemaps and notifying search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask. There are also tools for creating sitemaps such as the XML-Sitemaps.com tool or Google’s Webmaster Tools.
As we’ve said before, making sitemaps “shouldn’t take precedence over good internal linking, inbound link acquisition, a proper title structure, or content that makes your site a resource and not just a list of pages.” However, taking just a little bit of time with a good tool will help you complete your SEO package with a sitemap. Take this tutorial and make your site known!
Apple has enabled iPadOS updates over 5G, giving users the opportunity to update their iPads using their wireless data.
In the early days of iOS, Apple did not allow users to download OS updates via their wireless plans. Instead, OS updates required a WiFi connection. As unlimited plans became the norm, Apple changed their stance, allowing OS updates over 4G LTE.
With the iPhone 12, Apple expanded wireless OS downloads to include 5G as well. Now the company has rolled out the feature to the latest 12.9 and 11-inch iPad Pros, both of which support 5G.
Apple currently has three different 5G data modes: Allow More Data on 5G, Standard and Low Data Mode. To update over 5G, users will need to enable the More Data mode.
Allow More Data on 5G: Enables higher data-usage features for apps and system tasks. These include higher-quality FaceTime, high-definition content on Apple TV, Apple Music songs and videos, and iPadOS updates over cellular. This setting also allows third-party apps to use more cellular data for enhanced experiences. This is the default setting with some unlimited-data plans, depending on your carrier. This setting uses more cellular data.
Given the high speeds 5G offers, 5G OS updates are a welcome addition to the new iPad Pros.
