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Google Retires Web Light Webpage Transcoding

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Google Retires Web Light Webpage Transcoding

Google announced they are retiring the seven year old Web Light service that optimized webpages for devices on slow mobile devices and mobile connections.

The official Google developer page documentation for Web Light Google and the associated user agent (googleweblight) are both retired.

Google Web Light

Introduced in 2015, the purpose of the Web Light service was to make more of the web accessible to users in countries with slow mobile connections and devices.

The service worked by optimizing webpages so that downloading them used 80% less data, resulting in a four-fold increase in speed over the slower 2G mobile networks.

According to Google the service in a 50% increase in traffic to webpages.

Web Light previously worked on Chrome and Android browsers and only when Google detected a slow connection. The functionality did not trigger for desktop devices or tablets, only for mobile devices on slow connections.

Google Analytics still functioned in the Web Light optimized pages.

In terms of ad serving, Web Light optimized pages supported Sovrn, Zedo, AdSense, and Google Publisher Tags.

So in theory Web Light should not have impacted ad revenue but rather increased them since transcoded webpages received up to 50% more traffic at the time.

The service was first introduced in Indonesia and then to India.

The now deleted documentation described the functionality of Web Light:

“Google shows faster, lighter pages to people searching on slow mobile clients.

To do this, we transcode (convert) web pages on the fly into a version optimized for slow clients, so that these pages load faster while saving data.

This technology is called Web Light.

Web Light pages preserve a majority of the relevant content and provide a link for users to view the original page. “

Web Light No Longer Needed

Seven years later, the availability of inexpensive but powerful mobile devices and an improvement in mobile connection speeds made the necessity of the service no longer necessary.

According to Statista, 99% of mobile data usage in India during 2021 occurred over 4G devices.

In 2015 there were only 47 million devices that were 4G capable compared to 650 million in 2021.

The Google developer documentation for Web Light was removed and a note was added to Google’s User Agent documentation to communicate that the Web Light user agent is retired.

Google’s announcement stated:

“Removed the Web Light documentation and retired the Web Light user agent.

We introduced Web Light to enable us to serve faster, lighter pages to people searching on entry-level devices.

While this feature has worked as intended and enabled broader access to the richness of the web, increased affordability of more powerful smartphones has diminished the need for such functionality.

We remain committed to evolving and refining the Search experience to meet the changing needs of our users.”


Featured image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero

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8% Of Automattic Employees Choose To Resign

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8% Of Automattic Employees Choose To Resign

WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO announced today that he offered Automattic employees the chance to resign with a severance pay and a total of 8.4 percent. Mullenweg offered $30,000 or six months of salary, whichever one is higher, with a total of 159 people taking his offer.

Reactions Of Automattic Employees

Given the recent controversies created by Mullenweg, one might be tempted to view the walkout as a vote of no-confidence in Mullenweg. But that would be a mistake because some of the employees announcing their resignations either praised Mullenweg or simply announced their resignation while many others tweeted how happy they are to stay at Automattic.

One former employee tweeted that he was sad about recent developments but also praised Mullenweg and Automattic as an employer.

He shared:

“Today was my last day at Automattic. I spent the last 2 years building large scale ML and generative AI infra and products, and a lot of time on robotics at night and on weekends.

I’m going to spend the next month taking a break, getting married, and visiting family in Australia.

I have some really fun ideas of things to build that I’ve been storing up for a while. Now I get to build them. Get in touch if you’d like to build AI products together.”

Another former employee, Naoko Takano, is a 14 year employee, an organizer of WordCamp conferences in Asia, a full-time WordPress contributor and Open Source Project Manager at Automattic announced on X (formerly Twitter) that today was her last day at Automattic with no additional comment.

She tweeted:

“Today was my last day at Automattic.

I’m actively exploring new career opportunities. If you know of any positions that align with my skills and experience!”

Naoko’s role at at WordPress was working with the global WordPress community to improve contributor experiences through the Five for the Future and Mentorship programs. Five for the Future is an important WordPress program that encourages organizations to donate 5% of their resources back into WordPress. Five for the Future is one of the issues Mullenweg had against WP Engine, asserting that they didn’t donate enough back into the community.

Mullenweg himself was bittersweet to see those employees go, writing in a blog post:

“It was an emotional roller coaster of a week. The day you hire someone you aren’t expecting them to resign or be fired, you’re hoping for a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Every resignation stings a bit.

However now, I feel much lighter. I’m grateful and thankful for all the people who took the offer, and even more excited to work with those who turned down $126M to stay. As the kids say, LFG!”

Read the entire announcement on Mullenweg’s blog:

Automattic Alignment

Featured Image by Shutterstock/sdx15

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YouTube Extends Shorts To 3 Minutes, Adds New Features

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YouTube Extends Shorts To 3 Minutes, Adds New Features

YouTube expands Shorts to 3 minutes, adds templates, AI tools, and the option to show fewer Shorts on the homepage.

  • YouTube Shorts will allow 3-minute videos.
  • New features include templates, enhanced remixing, and AI-generated video backgrounds.
  • YouTube is adding a Shorts trends page and comment previews.

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How To Stop Filter Results From Eating Crawl Budget

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How To Find The Right Long-tail Keywords For Articles

Today’s Ask An SEO question comes from Michal in Bratislava, who asks:

“I have a client who has a website with filters based on a map locations. When the visitor makes a move on the map, a new URL with filters is created. They are not in the sitemap. However, there are over 700,000 URLs in the Search Console (not indexed) and eating crawl budget.

What would be the best way to get rid of these URLs? My idea is keep the base location ‘index, follow’ and newly created URLs of surrounded area with filters switch to ‘noindex, no follow’. Also mark surrounded areas with canonicals to the base location + disavow the unwanted links.”

Great question, Michal, and good news! The answer is an easy one to implement.

First, let’s look at what you’re trying and apply it to other situations like ecommerce and publishers. This way, more people can benefit. Then, go into your strategies above and end with the solution.

What Crawl Budget Is And How Parameters Are Created That Waste It

If you’re not sure what Michal is referring to with crawl budget, this is a term some SEO pros use to explain that Google and other search engines will only crawl so many pages on your website before it stops.

If your crawl budget is used on low-value, thin, or non-indexable pages, your good pages and new pages may not be found in a crawl.

If they’re not found, they may not get indexed or refreshed. If they’re not indexed, they cannot bring you SEO traffic.

This is why optimizing a crawl budget for efficiency is important.

Michal shared an example of how “thin” URLs from an SEO point of view are created as customers use filters.

The experience for the user is value-adding, but from an SEO standpoint, a location-based page would be better. This applies to ecommerce and publishers, too.

Ecommerce stores will have searches for colors like red or green and products like t-shirts and potato chips.

These create URLs with parameters just like a filter search for locations. They could also be created by using filters for size, gender, color, price, variation, compatibility, etc. in the shopping process.

The filtered results help the end user but compete directly with the collection page, and the collection would be the “non-thin” version.

Publishers have the same. Someone might be on SEJ looking for SEO or PPC in the search box and get a filtered result. The filtered result will have articles, but the category of the publication is likely the best result for a search engine.

These filtered results can be indexed because they get shared on social media or someone adds them as a comment on a blog or forum, creating a crawlable backlink. It might also be an employee in customer service responded to a question on the company blog or any other number of ways.

The goal now is to make sure search engines don’t spend time crawling the “thin” versions so you can get the most from your crawl budget.

The Difference Between Indexing And Crawling

There’s one more thing to learn before we go into the proposed ideas and solutions – the difference between indexing and crawling.

  • Crawling is the discovery of new pages within a website.
  • Indexing is adding the pages that are worthy of showing to a person using the search engine to the database of pages.

Pages can get crawled but not indexed. Indexed pages have likely been crawled and will likely get crawled again to look for updates and server responses.

But not all indexed pages will bring in traffic or hit the first page because they may not be the best possible answer for queries being searched.

Now, let’s go into making efficient use of crawl budgets for these types of solutions.

Using Meta Robots Or X Robots

The first solution Michal pointed out was an “index,follow” directive. This tells a search engine to index the page and follow the links on it. This is a good idea, but only if the filtered result is the ideal experience.

From what I can see, this would not be the case, so I would recommend making it “noindex,follow.”

Noindex would say, “This is not an official page, but hey, keep crawling my site, you’ll find good pages in here.”

And if you have your main menu and navigational internal links done correctly, the spider will hopefully keep crawling them.

Canonicals To Solve Wasted Crawl Budget

Canonical links are used to help search engines know what the official page to index is.

If a product exists in three categories on three separate URLs, only one should be “the official” version, so the two duplicates should have a canonical pointing to the official version. The official one should have a canonical link that points to itself. This applies to the filtered locations.

If the location search would result in multiple city or neighborhood pages, the result would likely be a duplicate of the official one you have in your sitemap.

Have the filtered results point a canonical back to the main page of filtering instead of being self-referencing if the content on the page stays the same as the original category.

If the content pulls in your localized page with the same locations, point the canonical to that page instead.

In most cases, the filtered version inherits the page you searched or filtered from, so that is where the canonical should point to.

If you do both noindex and have a self-referencing canonical, which is overkill, it becomes a conflicting signal.

The same applies to when someone searches for a product by name on your website. The search result may compete with the actual product or service page.

With this solution, you’re telling the spider not to index this page because it isn’t worth indexing, but it is also the official version. It doesn’t make sense to do this.

Instead, use a canonical link, as I mentioned above, or noindex the result and point the canonical to the official version.

Disavow To Increase Crawl Efficiency

Disavowing doesn’t have anything to do with crawl efficiency unless the search engine spiders are finding your “thin” pages through spammy backlinks.

The disavow tool from Google is a way to say, “Hey, these backlinks are spammy, and we don’t want them to hurt us. Please don’t count them towards our site’s authority.”

In most cases, it doesn’t matter, as Google is good at detecting spammy links and ignoring them.

You do not want to add your own site and your own URLs to the disavow tool. You’re telling Google your own site is spammy and not worth anything.

Plus, submitting backlinks to disavow won’t prevent a spider from seeing what you want and do not want to be crawled, as it is only for saying a link from another site is spammy.

Disavowing won’t help with crawl efficiency or saving crawl budget.

How To Make Crawl Budgets More Efficient

The answer is robots.txt. This is how you tell specific search engines and spiders what to crawl.

You can include the folders you want them to crawl by marketing them as “allow,” and you can say “disallow” on filtered results by disallowing the “?” or “&” symbol or whichever you use.

If some of those parameters should be crawled, add the main word like “?filter=location” or a specific parameter.

Robots.txt is how you define crawl paths and work on crawl efficiency. Once you’ve optimized that, look at your internal links. A link from one page on your site to another.

These help spiders find your most important pages while learning what each is about.

Internal links include:

  • Breadcrumbs.
  • Menu navigation.
  • Links within content to other pages.
  • Sub-category menus.
  • Footer links.

You can also use a sitemap if you have a large site, and the spiders are not finding the pages you want with priority.

I hope this helps answer your question. It is one I get a lot – you’re not the only one stuck in that situation.

More resources: 


Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

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