Talks about the mid-June Core Web Vitals release made SEOs worry. Google states that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor, but doesn’t say a thing about how important this factor will be. Still, when it comes to ranking, it’s always better to optimize anything that could somehow affect your positions than just leave things as they are. Moreover, Core Web Vitals optimization will be useful anyway, even if its impact on ranking appears lower than it is supposed to be now. Core Web Vitals are all about user experience, so your users will only thank you if they see your website works smooth and fast.
The hype around the CWV release made SEOs ask for some new tools that could let them turn the Core Web Vitals optimization into an SEO routine. This demand for new optimization opportunities made many SEO software providers release new modules for working with Core Web Vitals. Still, the functionality of most of these tools is too limited to let you analyze all of your website’s pages in-depth. The features that you do need to effectively audit and optimize CWV are as follows:
All this said, let’s take a look at the 5 popular SEO tools and see what they offer for CWV optimization.
WebSite AuditorWebSite Auditor is a well-known desktop SEO software solution. The tool loves the concept of “the more data the better”, which couldn’t but reflect in the new Core Web Vitals module. The tool features reports on more than 80 page speed metrics. What’s more, all the data are taken directly from Google via the official API, which means you see the same data and recommendations as Google does.
One of the WebSite Auditor’s undoubted benefits is the possibility to check all of your website’s pages at once. Thus, you don’t need to check any single URL manually as you’d have to in PageSpeed Insights.
WebSite Auditor lets you get all the CWV optimization details within a couple of clicks. Launch the tool, enter the domain and let the tool collect the information. Then, go to Site Structure > Pages, and switch to the Page Speed workspace.
Click the update sign on any column, put a tick on Page Speed data, and enter your Google API key. The tool will now collect the data and present them on the screen.
The Page Speed module will show you what pages pass the Core Web Vitals assessment and what don’t. The table will also specify what exactly makes your pages fall behind, and give you detailed instructions on how to optimize CWV.
One more advantage of WebSite Auditor is the possibility to save and bulk export CWV reports in CSV. So you can easily share these reports with your colleagues or send them to your clients.
Price: The most affordable edition — WebSite Auditor Professional — will cost you $125/year (unlimited number of pages to optimize). You can also use a free WebSite Auditor sandbox version to test the tool before the purchase. The free edition is nice for time-to-time checks for a smaller website (under 500 URLs).
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog lets you check your website for all the SEO troubles and provides suggestions on how to fix them. It also uses direct data from Google for its new Core Web Vitals module.
Just like WebSite Auditor, Screaming Frog will require an API key from Google. This means that the number of pages checked per day will be limited to 25,000. To start your work, launch the tool, go to Configuration > API Access > PageSpeed Insights, paste the API key from Google, choose the user agent (either mobile or desktop), and set up the metrics you want to see (you can choose all of them, too).
The downside of Screaming Frog is the inability to bulk export the Page Speed report. In case you need to do that, you’ll have to manually copy and paste the lines into an Excel table. Still, you can export the reports with Page Speed optimization opportunities to hand them to web developers for fixing.
Price: Keep in mind that you can only check the Core Web Vitals of your website with the paid version of Screaming Frog. One license costs £149 per year (around $209; may vary due to exchange rate fluctuations).
DeepСrawl
DeepCrawl is the cloud SEO software for businesses and corporate clients. Literally — you will need a corporate email to log in to the service. Emails like @gmail.com are not accepted. DeepCrawl doesn’t seem to use the Google API key, and all the Core Web Vitals data are taken from their own controlled environment.
To see how your website handles the Core Web Vitals assessment, you’ll have to switch on the JavaScript rendering feature. Then, just let the software crawl your website, and go to the Performance menu.
Click on the i sign to see additional information on how to optimize a certain metric.
The reports are available in the Data Studio connector. To fetch new reports in the existing dashboard, edit and reconnect the source.
Note: Core Web Vitals will only be measured for the desktop version of the website.
DeepCrawl will not show you any data on the First Input Delay (FID) metric. FID is a field metric; to collect it, the field real user experience data are needed, which cannot be anyhow simulated in any lab environment. That’s why the DeepCrawl creators suggest using their tool together with your own CrUX dashboard to receive more accurate data.
Important! Any cloud SEO software will not provide you the FID data. This happens due to the physical impossibility to retrieve the field data (at least, none of the cloud tools does this now). As Google only uses the field data to evaluate your pages, you should keep in mind the possible inaccuracy of the lab data. If you need clear and accurate data, you’ll have to use desktop software that collects the data via Google API. You can also keep checking pages with PageSpeed Insights, but you’ll hardly appreciate checking all of your URLs one by one.
Price: DeepCrawl doesn’t have the price listed on their website, and you’ll have to request pricing individually (you’ll also need a business email to do that). Still, many reviews on various forums and marketplaces mention that the tool is pretty costly, and will probably suit businesses with bigger budgets on SEO software. There’s no information on if there’s any kind of free trial, but you can book a personalized demo.
SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the most popular cloud SEO tools. SEMrush creators decided to keep this popularity, and enriched the tool with the Core Web Vitals module.
Auditing your website’s Core Web Vitals with SEMrish is easy. What you need is to perform a general audit of your website. Go to On Page & Tech SEO > Site Audit, enter the domain you want to analyze, and choose the type of user agent.
As SEMrush doesn’t use Google API and takes all the lab data from Lighthouse, you will not get the FID metrics data. Moreover, the Lighthouse lab data don’t fully reflect the real assessment of your page and are less likely to be considered by Google when ranking your pages.
Note: SEMrush shows the Core Web Vitals data for the homepage only.
As for the exporting, you cannot export the CWV report from the tool. If you need to show it to your clients or website developers, you’ll have to take a screenshot of the page.
One more downside of the SEMrush Core Web Vitals module is that you will not get the improvement opportunities on the spot. Instead, it is suggested that you visit the Site Performance report and see the suggestions listed there.
Price: The cheapest edition — SEMrush Pro — will cost $119.95/month. This edition lets you work on 5 projects and crawl up to 20,000 pages per project monthly. The largest package (Business) is limited by 40 projects up to 100,000 pages each, but the general monthly crawling limit cannot exceed 1,000,000 pages. You can also get a fully customized edition if ready-made plans don’t suit your business needs. A 7-days free trial is available for Pro and Guru editions, but you’ll have to provide your credit card data to get it.
MOZ
MOZ is another well-known cloud SEO tool. The growing industry demand on Core Web Vitals checks made the MOZ team release a Performance Metrics module (beta version available yet). This module shows the data for both mobile and desktop website versions. As cloud tools don’t seem to use the Google API key, MOZ takes the lab data from Lighthouse. These data don’t reflect the real users’ behavior.
The Performance Metrics module is placed under the Site Crawl tool. You can check all of your pages, or you can save some time and choose to check your top pages by page authority, top-ranked pages, or pages with any crawl issues.
MOZ is probably the only cloud SEO tool that handles the bulk checks and collects the data for all types of devices. Despite the limited functionality of cloud software in terms of CWV checks, MOZ seems capable enough (mind that it’s just a beta version). The team also plans to enable exporting of the Performance Metrics report. As for now exporting is unavailable.
Price: The most affordable MOZ edition will cost $99/month. This edition is limited by 100,000 pages per week, but, as you remember, you are still limited to 6000 pages for CWV checks monthly. A free 30-days trial is available before the purchase (credit card credentials needed).
Bonus: PageSpeed Compare
PageSpeed Compare is not an SEO tool in the way it is usually meant. It’s a kind of free sandbox that can help you in competitor analysis. The tool lets you compare the Core Web Vitals of your page with the pages of your competitors. PageSpeed Compare will show you both lab and field data. Just like PageSpeed Insights, but you can enter several different URLs to compare them.
PageSpeed Compare is easy to use. You just need to check the URLs you want to compare one by one.
Facebook automates network peering to enable smoother web traffic management
Facebook Inc.’s engineering team today revealed how it overcame one of the most time-consuming problems in networking by automating a process called “network peering” that enables more efficient exchange of internet traffic across various networks and service providers.
In a blog post, Facebook engineers Jenny Ramseyer and Jakub Heichman explained that network peering involves sending internet traffic through something called a “peering exchange,” which serves as a common meeting point where lots of networks interconnect by establishing Border Gateway Protocol or BGP sessions between their routers. The peering sessions, as they’re often called, enable networks to establish the fastest, most direct route from an internet server to the user’s internet service provider, helping improve the performance, latency and reliability of the connections.
The only problem with peering sessions is that they need to be set up manually by each network provider, an incredibly complex, slow, inefficient and error-prone process, as Ramseyer and Heichman explain:
“Before developing our automated system, we suffered the same struggle. Peers would email us to request to establish peering sessions. Next, one of our Edge engineers would verify the email and check our mutual traffic levels. To confirm the traffic levels were appropriate, that team member had to check numerous internal dashboards, reports, and rulebooks, as well as external resources, such as the potential peer’s PeeringDB record. The team member then would use a few internal tools to configure BGP sessions, reply back to the peer, and wait for the peer to configure their side of the network.”
Facebook’s response was to create an automated system that lets peers request their own public peering sessions directly from the new facebook.com/peering page.
Networks must use the PeeringDB’s OAuth service, which is a part of the PeeringDB database, an open-source registry of network provider’s peering information.
“To ensure that peering requests made on our peering page are from an authorized person, we require the requester to authenticate using their PeeringDB login and leverage PeeringDB’s OAuth service on behalf of their network’s organization,” Ramseyer and Heichman said. “The peer does not need to provide any other authentication — no Facebook account is required. Once authenticated, the peer will see a list of all their network’s existing public peering sessions with Facebook and can submit new requests.”
Once the peer has requested a session, Facebook’s automated internal process takes over. Each request is sent to an auditing queue and, once approved, a second service will launch a workflow to set up peering. After that, the automated system emails the peer to confirm everything is ready on Facebook’s side. Then they just have to configure their side of the network.
“As soon our workflow detects that all sessions have been established, our workflow sends a final confirmation email,” the engineers wrote. “At that point, our peer should be able to see the new sessions as active in the table on facebook.com/peering.”
To ensure everything runs smoothly Facebook has created a monitoring system to sort through its peering@ mailbox. So whenever it detects a peering request, it automatically replies with instructions that direct the requester to the automated peering page.
Ramseyer and Heichman the system has so far processed more than 170 peering requests, approving 1,249 of them at the time of writing. As a result, it has automatically pushed more than 1,400 public peering sessions in total, saving its engineers about eight hours of work per week.
Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said that most internet users have no idea of the herculean effort that goes into traffic management.
“Peering is the solution for higher, faster and cheaper throughput, so it is good to see that one of the major users of bandwidth, Facebook, is now offering an open-source solution with its PeeringDB OAuth to enable this,” Mueller said. “It should help Facebook to improve user experiences while reducing network costs. We will see in a few months how successful PeeringDB OAuth is with the number of peering requests provided and used.”
Facebook is now calling for PeeringDB Oauth to be made an industry standard in all public peering automation applications. In addition, it’s also exploring the possibility of using PeeringDB Oauth to automate private peering network interconnects, which are a larger-volume counterpart to public peering.
Image: Facebook Since you’re here …Show your support for our mission with our one-click subscription to our YouTube channel (below). The more subscribers we have, the more YouTube will suggest relevant enterprise and emerging technology content to you. Thanks!
Support our mission: >>>>>> SUBSCRIBE NOW >>>>>> to our YouTube channel.
… We’d also like to tell you about our mission and how you can help us fulfill it. SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s business model is based on the intrinsic value of the content, not advertising. Unlike many online publications, we don’t have a paywall or run banner advertising, because we want to keep our journalism open, without influence or the need to chase traffic.The journalism, reporting and commentary on SiliconANGLE — along with live, unscripted video from our Silicon Valley studio and globe-trotting video teams at theCUBE — take a lot of hard work, time and money. Keeping the quality high requires the support of sponsors who are aligned with our vision of ad-free journalism content.
If you like the reporting, video interviews and other ad-free content here, please take a moment to check out a sample of the video content supported by our sponsors, tweet your support, and keep coming back to SiliconANGLE.
How to Solve “Unusual Traffic from Your Network Computer” Google Error
While it usually doesn’t happen often, the “unusual traffic from your network computer” Google error is frustrating and confusing. You can get this error just from normal browsing, whether or not you have any “unusual traffic.” There are several different reasons you might see the error along with a few fixes to prevent or at least reduce how often you see it.
What Doers It Mean?At first, you might panic seeing the “unusual traffic from your network computer” error. Your first thought is probably along the lines of “I have a virus.” That was my first thought when I saw it.
While it could be a virus, Google (no matter which browser you’re using) gives you this error whenever the search giant suspects automated traffic. According to Google, using bots, web scrapers, computer programs, and automated services to search can get you blocked. The same is true if you use automated programs to check website ranks.
If you are like I was and not using any of those things, you probably feel even more confused right now. While the above is Google’s official reason for giving the error, there are a few other reasons:
While you’re getting this error, you can’t perform any more Google searches until you successfully solve a reCAPTCHA. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you won’t see a reCAPTCHA at all.
If you don’t see one or it doesn’t work, there’s still hope. Or, if you’re seeing this error often, there are still things you can do beyond solving endless reCAPTCHAs, which, let’s agree, everyone hates.
Scan for MalwareThe first step is to scan your system for malware. If you’re not searching Google that much or using any automated search tools, malware is a real possibility. Free antivirus tools usually work well for performing a deep scan. Tools like Malwarebytes focus more on malware and ransomware. While free tools may not always offer real-time protection, they can help you remove any malware currently causing you issues.
Reset Your Router/ModemThe “unusual traffic from your computer network” could be a simple misunderstanding between Google and your router or router/modem combo. Simply resetting the router refreshes the connection.
Turn your router off, wait 30 seconds to a few minutes, and turn it back on. Some routers also have a reset button, though not all. Resetting your router is also a great troubleshooting step if you’re having general network issues.
Take a BreakIt might sound just as annoying as the error itself, but if you’ve turned into a Google power user suddenly, taking a break may be the only way to stop Google from seeing you as a bot.
For instance, as a writer, I’m constantly doing research. I used to see the error every few months. Then, Google decided to crack down even more on automated searches. During one particular project, I was performing several searches a minute. No amount of reCAPTCHAs solved the issue. I just had to slow down my searches.
Actually, I ended up using Bing while Google calmed down. It’s important to note that even if you use alternative search engines, some of them still pull results from Google. So if you’re being blocked from searching Google, you may still get an error from them.
Turn Off Your VPNNot all VPNs are created equal. In fact, some of them are worse than using no VPN at all. Naturally, Google doesn’t like any of them since it makes it difficult for Google to track you. Some VPNs, though, are incredibly unsafe. These are blocked by Google.
If you’ve started using a new VPN, especially a free one, and see the “unusual traffic from your computer network” Google error, turn off the VPN and try searching again. If everything works well, it’s the VPN that’s the problem.
Log in to GoogleThough usually this isn’t the cause, I have personally had luck if I log in to my Google account and then search. Numerous searches while logged out can trigger Google into thinking you’re a bot and not a human user. This has helped me on occasion. While you’re never truly anonymous with Google, there are ways to make your searches more private.
You can also try using a different device if possible. It doesn’t always work, but if your phone is using mobile data, traffic appears from a different network than your computer.
Patience is sadly the best solution. As strange as it sounds, Google, the number one search engine, actually prefers you to search less often. Try the troubleshooting steps above to hopefully put an end to this frustrating error.
Related:
Is this article useful? Yes No
Crystal CrowderCrystal Crowder has spent over 15 years working in the tech industry, first as an IT technician and then as a writer. She works to help teach others how to get the most from their devices, systems, and apps. She stays on top of the latest trends and is always finding solutions to common tech problems.
Check Website Traffic | Site Traffic Estimator
No comments:
Post a Comment