Blog
Google quietly changes the SEO game
Posted by Paul Sturgess on April 23, 2010
Since we moved offices to the centre of Guildford we’ve been upping our efforts to optimise our website for particular search terms and with some success, most notably for ‘web design surrey’.
We started way back on page 9 of Google’s search results and today we reached the heady heights of number 2, or so we thought…
Curiously our listing in Google varies from computer to computer and even between different browsers on the same computer. We have seen this before, however, it has always been attributed to whether you are signed into Google or not as Google has been offering personalised search results to signed-in users for some years now. However, we were still getting different results even though we were not signed-in.
After some investigation it turns out that only last week Google made a significant change to the way personalised search works. Google now presents personalised search results to signed-out users worldwide. Search results will be customised for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser.
You can tell if your results are being customised as a “View customizations” link that will appear on the top right of the search results page. You can actually turn off the customisations or temporarily view the uncustomised results.
So where do we come in the uncustomised results for ‘web design surrey’? Page 2, which is still a decent improvement but clearly there is work still to be done.
What does this change by Google mean for SEO? Well, if everyone is shown personalised results then you can’t really ever claim to be “number one in Google”.
Kyan intranet gets an iPhone app makeover
Posted by Steven Wake on April 21, 2010
The Kyan office has more than it’s fair share of Apple phone users (a company iPhone is one of the perks of working here) — On that basis it made sense to create a version of our homegrown intranet that works on the iPhone when our folk are away from the office. Duties fell to Phil and myself to bring this to fruition.
Shoobs shortlisted for Shell LiveWIRE Grand Ideas Awards
Posted by Piers H Palmer on April 20, 2010
Congratulations to Louise@Shoobs for being shortlisted for the Shell LiveWIRE Grand Ideas Awards. A lot of blood and sweat (and almost tears) went into getting Shoobs live, all driven forward by the unflappable Louise.
We think it rocks but don’t just take our word for it check it out and vote for Louise at the Shell LiveWIRE Grand Ideas Awards website.
jQuery’s conquest of the web
Posted by Robin Whittleton on April 07, 2010
We love Ruby on Rails at Kyan: it removes a lot of the complexity in setting up a web app leaving us free to build the stuff that actually matters. Take a front end development perspective though and things start to look a little … messy. Rails’ inbuilt helpers let you get client-side interaction up and running quickly, but at the cost of blocks of fairly impenetrable code that rely on the Prototype Javascript framework. Even if you don’t use the helpers, Prototype is still part of the default Rails install.
Around about the time we started concentrating more on hand-coded Javascript, we decided that coding in Prototype wasn’t for us and migrated over to jQuery instead. This is not to denigrate Prototype – it provided a very solid base for Rails with good browser compatibility – but jQuery has a much more compact syntax and a better plugin community. One way to migrate is just to remove the default Prototype links and include jQuery, but to keep the transition smooth we also used a project called jRails: a Rails plugin that rewrites the inbuilt helpers to export the jQuery syntax.
For a year or two this setup gave us the flexibility to happily hand-code our own front-end Javascript and take advantage of jQuery’s plugin ecosystem, at the expense of having to ignore various Rails plugins that expected Prototype to be available. More recently though we’ve seen signs that the rest of the Rails community might be following our move. Plugins started appearing with dual Prototype/jQuery helpers (the Textile editor we use for text entry for example). Now even entire Rails applications are dropping Prototype in favour of jQuery. We’re currently evaluating the Spree e-commerce platform which has standardised on jQuery over Prototype.
The news seems to have reached the core Rails developers: as of Rails 3 the framework is officially agnostic towards Javascript frameworks. The expected JS development methodology is now unobtrusive hooking, which is far better in terms of code re-use and lower complexity. Outside of Rails jQuery’s prospects are looking even better. Microsoft are now directly contributing code to jQuery, and ship it with Visual Studio. Some stats sites are even claiming a near 30% usage rate among top-10,000 sites which is pretty extraordinary.
Overall, we’re very happy with the choice we made. Congratulations to the jQuery team, and here’s the the next couple of years of progress!