Google Gets New Favicon

Favicons, those little 16×16 pixel icons that appear next to your URL address in your browser. They’re often neglected (guilty M’Lord) but not it would seem by Google as they’ve got a new one:

I’ve spotted it on a few google pages including adsense and google apps so far. I think I’m right in saying that (the ace) google reader acquired a new favicon the other week (or maybe further back than that). I should really start to get and use my own favicons to assist with my sites branding.

Does Google Rate You As Safe

You can now use the google safe browsing diagnostic service to confirm that google rates your domain as safe. Here’s an example for the BBC opening in a new window – all looks fine. You can get the detail on this service by reading the official blog post.

I’ve noticed that you sometimes see this as part of the report:

What happened when Google visited this site?

Google has not visited this site within the past 90 days.

but I don’t think that it means your site hasn’t been spidered in the last 90 days.

As a check, it’s another worthwhile item to add to your domain maintenance checklist. If you’re a wordpress user I’ve previously offered a couple of security tips too.

The Need For (adwords) Speed

In case it’s escaped your attention, adwords is now telling you if you have issues with speed of your landing page. Furthermore, come mid-June the response speed of your landing page is to be factored in to the quality score.

It’s simple enough to see how adwords is currently rating your landing page speed …just hover over the magnifying glass next to a keyword within an ad group and then select the details and recommendations link for the quality score info.

If you’re doing some direct to merchant PPC then there isn’t much you can personally do to improve the landing page speed of course. But with your own pages you may want to tidy up your code, use CSS, compress large images and the like. If you’re using wordpress then much of this taken care for you already assuming your chosen theme is half decent. Your choice of web host is possibly the weakest link in the chain – you tend to get what you pay for.

Can anyone recommend a good host for wordpress (allowing custom permalinks) by the way? Dreamhost offer a great deal but they’ve had some server issues lately.

We’ve Got Balls… Techno Balls

Many thanks to Hawkins Bazaar for the very well packaged free gift that arrived in the post yesterday – a Techo Balls perpetual motion construction toy.

The compliment slip didn’t state why we’ve been lucky enough to receive the gift but as we’ve generated a few sales for them recently I’m guessing that’ll be why. It reminds me to put more effort into our little toy site too as it’s rather content light just now.

I’ll get Dad’s little helpers to put the toy together with me – it might keep them quiet for half an hour!

Thanks again to Hawkins Bazaar.