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There is one huge thing that is being missed here by both of you. The Google Insight grades on server response time. Server response time has no bearing on if a site loads 1 css file or 30 css files. It has not bearing on how many js files are loaded and if the parsing of them is deferred or not. If you follow all of the suggestions that pingdom gives you to the T, it will not affect your server response time one bit.

The only way to affect your server response time is going to be to reduce the processing time of your site. Not the loading time in the browser. To reduce your server response time you are going to have to explore server caching, mysql optimization, and things such as that.

This might help to read as well.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2383341?hl=en

http://www.blogaid.net/server-response-time-vs-page-load-time-for-google-crawl

I am not familiar with Drupal, when you say you are restructuring is that something internal in Drupal? Or does that mean you are changing the page structure of your site, like for instance moving pages around? Or are you removing some widgets and things like that from pages?

Server response time is tied to two factors. The first one is the DNS look up, the second one is the time it takes your server to generate a page and spit it out. Generally both of those can be improved without having to redesign your site. What is your site currently developed in? Is it constantly changing?

I haven't chosen to ignore a lot of the page speed recommendations personally. To me this is one area where Google has been unclear on and I have chosen to follow it the way I think they mean.

They have said that site speed is a ranking factor. But does that mean their page speed score is factored into it? I tend to think it does not. Which would you rather have, a site that loads in .5 seconds with a page speed score of 60 or one that loads in 3 seconds with a 100 page speed score? I want the first one. I use the suggestions as simple suggestions that I have to determine if they are worth the time and effort.

Do you have a link to your site, I can tell you what I would do.

I would make the links no follow. I think you could find yourself at risk for a penalty if you do not, it really just depends on how widely it is spread. But I would include the links, because they would generally be deemed helpful Especially for someone wanting a table of their site. But I would make them nofollowed links as well just to protect yourself.

I have looked for information on this in the past and come up empty handed. With page speed Google really pits you against best SEO practices. I think if you follow most of the page speed insights you can severely limit your SEO. How many images are you talking about, how does Google render the page in their fetch as Google?

I hope it did not come off like I was implying that you did, sorry if it did. I was more asking your thought on how the whole journalism system is going in so much as charging for things.

To me is has really put me in a place where I don't know where to stand on the issue. I am familiar with the content long game and having great content written. But I do feel like the Field of Dreams is not true. Some times you can have an awesome content piece, but only 100 people see, 10 share it, and they have a small network so it does not share past that. I have seen that happen to several people I work with. But on the other hand I have seen companies that might gross 20k in a month "buy" an article from a major publisher and then gross 200k that month.

Not to give too much away, but I had a client that miss-ordered a lipstick color  and ordered a very unpopular color in bulk. The manufacturer would not take it back because it was soon to be discontinued. They held on to the stock for about 8 months only selling 1-2 a month. As a last ditch effort before having a fire sale, they bought a placement in a magazine that came with a digital article too. They sold out of those 1900 units in a week. It worked, it made them more money, it got them more followers, more exposure, and they unloaded something they were just about to write off. So I know it works. I am just trying to wrap my head around it being against the rules and working so well.

I hope I didn't offend you, that is not what I was going for.

I look at you as the content guru, so I have to ask what your thoughts on paid news articles are. I know with us, we have dealt with paid articles in print or/and web format from Elle, Vogue, Huff Post, CNN, and just about every major content player for every niche. More and more it seems that if you want to be in the "hot blog" that drives traffic, there is a price.

I know it is against Google guidelines to buy follow links from these places, but I would not exactly consider them a bad neighborhood either. Especially since not every link is a paid link. It seems like a penalty would be hard to lay down against some of the big publishers without hurting a lot of innocent people.

Do you think it will help your site? Google says not to pay for links, but this is pretty much the standard of how online journalism works these days.

I second this. Whitespark is great.

Edward,

No worries, you can integrate their tracking code into your website as well without using a plugin.

I have had a couple of clients that use this system, https://tapfiliate.com/integrations/wordpress-affiliate-marketing/  They seem to like it well enough.

I have recently had Bingbot crawl a site until it almost locked the database up, so it is possible. If you have doubts whether it is Bing bot or not, take to the logs and start extracting the ip addresses. You can verify them here, http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3905dc26

My view differs from the other views posted. I prefer to rel canonical the paginated pages to the index. The reason why is for user experience and landing page optimization. A paginated page generally if landed on from a search results in a poor user experience. Plus generally in an ecommerce shop the products are changing and moving around so it is hard to rank for anything in particular. So I have just dropped trying to rank them. I simply point the canonical on the paginated pages to the main category root.

One thing I also do is have a description and image on the category root as well, I hide that on the paginated pages to and opt for a more product centric view.

The canonical pointing back to the main category landing page can been seen in a lot of ecommerce sites these days. Like walmart, http://www.walmart.com/browse/home-improvement/air-conditioners/1072864_133032_133026?page=2&cat_id=1072864_133032_133026  This should link you to page 2 of the air conditioners category, but the canonical will take you to page 1.

You can observe the same thing with Target.com as well. Theirs is a little bit harder to paste since they use a filtered type result on their category pages, but here is one http://www.target.com/sb/car-seats-baby/-/N-5xtlxZ55pdd#navigation=true&category=5xtlx&searchTerm=&view_type=medium&sort_by=bestselling&faceted_value=55pdd&offset=60&pageCount=60&response_group=Items&isLeaf=false&parent_category_id=5xtly&custom_price=false&min_price=from&max_price=to  It cannonicals back to the main category page, even though it is actually a sub category.

As far as I know Amazon is one of the only companies that still canonicals to paginated pages.

I thought they took the affiliate site down a couple of years ago. I signed up and a week later it was removed with a redesign coming soon.

Right, but dealing with ecommerce I have a lot of clients that rank well with images. If the images are taken out of the index and added to a new sub domain, they lose all of the value of the main domain and never come back up. They are generally competing with people that might be using the same images, or very similar ones so it is a tough market and people generally cannot afford all of their images to be de-indexed for a while and then at the same time lose their ranking on them because they are using a new sub domain.

This is the normal layout I use in setting up a CDN. site.com for the main content and cdn.site.com for the cdn content. I have found that doing it that way de-indexes the images from site.com and re-indexes it on cdn.site.com Which if you have high ranking images on site.com pretty much puts you back at 0.

Yes, it will create issues and it is a pain to deal with. The way that I found to deal with it, in my opinion is not the best but it works. Set your site up to detect google bot and not serve CDN images to google bot. That will help keep things indexed.

Weird error, but from what I can see gzip is still active. You might try to disable it again.

Bob,

Just to add to what Umar said, it looks like Google is integrating adwords into youtube in an interesting way. I just saw this, this morning. http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/google-bringing-buy-option-into-youtube-ads