Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed something about referrals: Google Images is very very valuable in attracting users to your website, and it’s equally much easier to get high rankings in the image search results than it is in native search results. The annoying thing about Google Images however, is the way it simply offers the image up to the viewer in a separate frame, making it easy for visitors to simply steal/view your image directly and leave again, never actually paying any attention to your site and potentially reducing your income if the site is monetised with advertisements, and removing any value to you of the visitor.
File-size and bandwidth obsessions are not bad qualities to find in a webmaster: bandwidth costs you money, and the longer it takes for someone to download all the bits and pieces that make up your site, the more likely it is that your visitor will give up and leave - especially if your server is already busy serving hundreds of files to somebody else…!
One of the biggest expenses in bandwidth is AJAX libraries: although they’re developed to be relatively compact, and you can minify them easily, a full version of JQuery UI 1.6 will “cost” you and your visitors almost half a megabyte! And the worst thing is, every time that same person goes off to another site which also uses the exact same library as the one of your site, they still have to download it all over again.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there is a legitimate and useful reason for Google Cache but when you have a gaggle of brain-dead idiots trying to circumnavigate their blocked status by using Google’s (out of date) cache and then making threats based on these, the shine is soon taken off what is otherwise an inoffensive and occasionally useful section of Google’s services.
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I must not keep trying to push my new car to it's limits on bumpy roads. I must not keep pushing my car to it's limits on bumpy roads..
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