Here’s one for fans of the hypertext HTTP protocol – should I use 429 or 503 when the server is overloaded? It used the be that we’d only see 503 as a temporary issue, but nowadays we treat them both about the same. We see both as a temporary issue, and tend to slow down crawling if we see a bunch of them. If they persist for longer and don’t look like temporary problems anymore, we tend to start dropping those URLs from our index (until we can recrawl them normally again).
TLDs & ranking
It feels like it’s time to reshare this again. There still is no inherent ranking advantage to using the new TLDs. They can perform well in search, just like any other TLD can perform well in search. They give you an opportunity to pick a name that better matches your web-presence. If you see posts claiming that early data suggests they’re doing well, keep in mind that’s this is not due to any artificial advantage in search: you can make a fantastic website that performs well in search on any TLD.
Mobile friendly
I’ve been asked about the mobile-friendly tag in search and noticed two common mistakes that I wanted to share. Both of these result in the Mobile-Friendly Test showing that a page isn’t mobile-friendly, but the PageSpeed Insights tool showing that it’s ok: Too much blocked by robots.txt. Googlebot needs to be able to recognize the mobile-friendliness through crawling. If a JavaScript file that does a redirect is blocked, if a CSS file that’s necessary for the mobile version of the page is blocked, or if you use separate URLs and block those, then Googlebot won’t be able to see your mobile site.
Authorship
I’ve been involved since we first started testing authorship markup and displaying it in search results. We’ve gotten lots of useful feedback from all kinds of webmasters and users, and we’ve tweaked, updated, and honed recognition and displaying of authorship information. Unfortunately, we’ve also observed that this information isn’t as useful to our users as we’d hoped, and can even distract from those results. With this in mind, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop showing authorship in search results.
Because ... Grrrrrghtasdiflksjldfjlj2piha'sokbnvlkbjnewaiobhv!!!
One person’s time savings (archive.org) result in another persons cursing.
Because ... Grrrrrghtasdiflksjldfjlj2piha'sokbnvlkbjnewaiobhv!!! »
Authorship 1
We’ve been doing lots of work to clean up the visual design of our search results, in particular creating a better mobile experience and a more consistent design across devices. As a part of this, we’re simplifying the way authorship is shown in mobile and desktop search results, removing the profile photo and circle count. (Our experiments indicate that click-through behavior on this new less-cluttered design is similar to the previous one.
Authorship vanity urls
Authorship works fine with Google+ custom/vanity URLs. I’ve seen this come up more since custom/vanity URLs for Google+ profiles have become more popular. Authorship works fine with vanity profile URLs, it works fine with the numeric URLs, and it doesn’t matter if you link to your “about” or “posts” page, or even just to the base profile URL. The type of redirect (302 vs 301) also doesn’t matter here. If you want to have a bit of fun, you can even use one of the other Google ccTLDs and link to that.
503s
Dear webmasters, if something goes drastically wrong with your hoster, and you can’t host your website anymore, please return a “503 Service unavailable” HTTP result code. Doing so helps search engines to understand what’s up – they’re generally more than happy to give your site some time to catch up again. Returning an error page with “200 OK” will result in us indexing the change of content like that (and if all of your pages return the same error page, then we may assume that these URLs are duplicates).
Basic 3.3v power supply / regulator
Not all Arduinos can supply the 3.3v that the NRF24L01+ needs directly. For example, the Nano only supplies 3.3v if powered via USB. To get 3.3v from a power source (such as what you would use to power the Arduino, or the 5v output of the Arduino), all you need is a regulator and a capacitor. For this, I used a LD1117v33 (archive.org) (the LM1117v33 (archive.org) is pretty much equivalent) together with a 10uF capacitor.
Using the Nordic nRF24L01+ with a Seeeduino Mega 1280
The nRF24L01+ module (sources (archive.org)) is a really cheap & easy way to achieve wireless communications. With the internal antenna, the reach is about 100m (open area), with an extra antenna it’s apparently 1100m+. One popular Arduino library for it is the Mirf library (archive.org). Connections Required pins with fix locations / can’t be moved: Arduino Uno / Nano (archive.org): MISO -> 12 MOSI -> 11 SCK -> 13 Seeeduino Mega 1280 (archive.