Scraping data from a website likely doesn’t violate anti-hacking laws as long as the data is public, a US court has concluded. Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said LinkedIn probably couldn’t tell an analytics company to stop pulling profile information from its platform. LinkedIn had sent the company, HiQ, a cease-and-desist letter — which has been enough to declare companies “unauthorized” in earlier cases. Here, however, the court ruled that LinkedIn couldn’t use anti-hacking rules to control how HiQ used the data.

As University of California, Berkeley professor and computer law expert Orin Kerr lays out, this seemingly limits one section of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The CFAA prohibits accessing a computer “without authorization.” It was conceived as a way to punish hacking in the 1980s, but it’s frequently used against companies that access social media website data. Facebook, for instance, stopped a company called Power Ventures from automatically aggregating social media posts with users’ permission.

Yesterday’s ruling distinguished between how Facebook and LinkedIn guard their data. Facebook “tried to limit and control access to its website,” requiring users to log in with a username and password. But “the data HiQ was scraping was available to anyone with a web browser.” Therefore, LinkedIn couldn’t specifically order HiQ to stop accessing this publicly available information under the CFAA.
“Sending a cease-and-desist letter isn’t enough to deny access”

Many civil liberties advocates opposed the Power Ventures decision, and as Techdirt’s Mike Masnick writes, the court is drawing a pretty fine line between Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook’s data might have been password-protected, but users were freely granting account access to Power Ventures. It seems plausible to call this access “authorized” as well — but the LinkedIn ruling disagrees with that logic.

The court also says LinkedIn could still potentially claim other violations, including copyright infringement — this is just a preliminary ruling on specific issues. But ruling out CFAA charges is a big deal, because the CFAA can be broadly weaponized against anybody who uses a computer in a way a company or government disagrees with. Kerr calls the ruling a “critical limit” on the law’s interpretation.

As Stanford Internet Observatory director Alex Stamos pointed out on Twitter, this comes with trade-offs. “Cease and desist letters followed by civil action or criminal CFAA referrals are one of the few legal tools available to large providers looking to stop spammers or scrapers,” Stamos wrote. Now, that option appears much less viable. That’s annoying in the case of spammers, but it also raises privacy questions at a point when companies are using big public data sets to train tools like facial recognition algorithms. Even so, Stamos reiterated that he agreed with the court’s decision.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/10/20859399/linkedin-hiq-data-scraping-cfaa-lawsuit-ninth-circuit-ruling?fbclid=IwAR1WVhTUVrLXKjQSBxgAnlHgKzyNgxuIFHDyKRqFqfaSjeBZxngUyEfRQ9Y

What is a responsive website?

A responsive website changes the layout to offer an experience based on the device being used, especially ideal for mobile viewing.

A mobile responsive website includes design elements such as:

• Readable text without requiring zoom
• Adequate space for tap targets
• No horizontal scrolling

Did you know the number of smartphone users internationally surpassed 2 billion in 2016?

Websites not optimized for all these smaller screens can experience a decline in their search engine rankings. Meaning, they are not getting found online.

It’s true that over 60% of searches online now come from a mobile device.

To ensure your website offers an experience tailored to handheld devices (without creating a separate app), consider why responsive design is important as a mobile solution.

Source: Volusion

Let’s get into the details about the why and how.

First of all…what the heck is mobile responsive design and why should you care?

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design (RWD) creates a system for a single site to react to the size of a user’s device—with one URL and one content source. A responsive website has a fluid and flexible layout which adjusts according to screen size.

The importance of responsive web design is that it offers an optimized browsing experience.

Basically, your website will look great and work well on a desktop (or laptop), a tablet, and a mobile phone’s browser.

Get this:

In the past, developers built more than one site in order to accommodate different screen sizes. With the number of device types out there on the market today, this seems completely inefficient…right?

Now you can understand why responsive web design is not a shiny trend anymore, but more of a shift in the thinking behind building websites. The term was actually coined in 2010 by web designer Ethan Marcotte.

“Responsive web design offers us a way forward, finally allowing us to design for the ebb and flow of things.” -Ethan Marcotte

Having a mobile responsive website is not just another option—it’s a requirement!

Benefits of Mobile Responsive Design

The number one benefit of a responsive layout is the guarantee that any user on any device will have the best experience possible on your website. And, the most consistent.

Website responsiveness is also a great way to refine the content on your site, making sure that people using a mobile device are only seeing the most essential information.

With the Google algorithm update, a responsive web design increases visibility on search engines—because it is mobile-friendly. A site with an effective mobile experience will show up in search results above one without.

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Why Responsive Design is Important for Business

• Increase reach to customers and clients on smaller devices (tablets & smartphones)
• A consistent experience that can increase lead generation, sales and conversions
• Analytics, tracking, and reporting can all be in one place
• Time and cost on-site content management is decreased
• Stay ahead of the competition (even 44% of Fortune 500 companies are not mobile-ready at this time!)

Note, that there are two other methods by which to offer a mobile-friendly experience. The first is called Dynamic Serving, which uses the same URL but different HTML and CSS code. Pages recognize the device they are viewed on, and serve up the correct code.

The second method, is a separate mobile site altogether. When users visit on a mobile device, they are sent to a different mobile-specific URL.

As long as the correct steps are taken to optimize fully for mobile users, the most useful method really depends on any given situation. Figure out which works the best for your online presence, before diving into it.

Google accounts for over 5.7 billion searches conducted on the web daily.

The Google-recommended configuration for smartphone-optimized sites is responsive web design.

Google even offers a mobile responsive test, so that you can see how easily a visitor is able to use your page on a mobile device. You simply enter a page URL and receive a score.

How to Make a Responsive Design

There are a number of things to think about when creating a responsive layout. It is a process that requires a design system and hierarchy of content across devices.

The three main components of a responsive web design include:

• A fluid grid
• Flexible text & images
• Media queries

I’ll explain each further.

A Fluid Grid

The grid is a crucial element for creating a responsive layout.

Now, grids aren’t anything new.

Web designers have used grids for building websites since the beginning. However, in the past, these grids were fixed width and didn’t lend themselves to support a fluid website layout.

A fluid grid used for responsive sites will ensure that the design is flexible and scalable. Elements will have consistent spacing, proportion, and can adjust to a specific screen-width based on percentages.

 

 

With a fluid grid, users will have the best experience on whatever screen they view your responsive website on.

Flexible Text & Images

The way to display text varies depending on what device a user is viewing your site on, but it should be readable no matter what. On mobile responsive websites, there is an opportunity to increase font size and line height (the spacing between each line of text) for legibility.

Flexible text and images adjust within a website layout width, according to the content hierarchy set with the CSS (stylesheet). Text can now be legible regardless of the end user’s device. With a flexible container (within the grid), text can wrap with an increase in font size on smaller devices.

Flexible images can prove to be more challenging because of load times on smaller device browsers. But these images can scale, crop, or disappear depending on what content is essential to the mobile experience.

Media Queries

This is code that powers the flexibility of a layout on responsive websites. Media queries specify the CSS to be applied accordingly, depending on a device’s breakpoint (for example, iPhone portrait orientation or iPad landscape orientation, etc.).

Media queries allow for multiple layouts of a design, which use the same HTML-coded web page.

There are other areas that can help define and refine responsive web design for mobile.

Take a look:

User Testing of Responsive Websites

The information about how users interact with your site is invaluable and worth investing in, to create an optimal experience for them.

There are many ways you can conduct user testing to get the most useful feedback possible.

Browser and Device Testing for Responsive Design

Make sure a responsive design layout is compatible with all relevant browsers and retains the integrity of your user experience & design.

Don’t rely only on dragging the browser in and out to test a responsive web design for mobile; try viewing a site on as many physical devices as you can.

You’ll be surprised at what may be uncovered from one operating system to the next.

Inspiration from Responsive Websites

As with any design project, find other responsive websites that execute responsive web design in creative ways.

This can be as simple as thinking about the following questions:

• Which websites or apps do you frequently use on your mobile phone or other portable devices?
• Why do you prefer one site over others that might provide similar services?
• Do you prefer their mobile experience or desktop experience?

Finding answers to these questions can help you find pain points that you may have never noticed during your everyday browsing.

SEO tips and tricks to increase your traffic

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more and more important to every site.  Historically, some of the techniques used have given SEO a bad name, but there are several simple ways to ensure your site benefits from natural search results.

Search can be classified as either organic (natural) or paid. Organic (natural) results are those that occur naturally in search engine results pages (SERPS) and high results depend on both the technical construction of your site and the content within it.

Paid results, often referred to as Pay Per Click or PPC, are the results site owners pay for and which usually surround the organic listings.

Research shows web users prefer organic listings to paid listings, considering them more relevant and trustworthy.

The goal of SEO, then, is to improve your organic listings performance, which in turn should boost traffic to your site.

Organic results

Search engines index the web using large clusters of computers, known as bots, which spider the web by following links found on web pages. These URLS are populated into the search engine indexes and it’s this index that’s queried every time a user performs a search.

Search engines employ complex mathematical equations, known as ranking algorithms, to order search results. Google’s algorithm alone relies on more than 200 individual factors to decide which result, in which order, to return to its web searchers.

Organic SEO can be further split into two categories: On-page: The code and content you use to manage and deliver your web pages. Off-page: External factors effecting SEO.

This is primarily focused around link building – getting other websites to link to your content. Here we’ll focus on on-page optimization methods, which are all under your control.

The most important thing is to maximize accessibility to ensure search engines can find all your content. There are two ways to get discovered by search engines.

One is to submit your site directly to their index (Google; Yahoo; Bing). The other is to wait for them to find it through links to you from other sites during their crawling process. For more information on Google’s crawling process, see this page.

Google url submission

To make sure your website is accessible to search engine spiders, follow these simple steps:

1. Ensure you’re not preventing the search engines indexing your site via The Robots Exclusion Protocol with use of a robots.txt file, which is used to give instructions to search engine bots. More information on this can be found here.

2. Ensure your content is machine-readable. Avoid using Flash, video or imagery to exclusively house your content. Remember, search spiders cannot see images or video: they can only read written text on a web page.

3. Ensure you have a clear internal linking architecture. Promote important content to the homepage and link to key site sections via dedicated navigation. Group content into clear site sections reflected in your site navigation to aid both users and search engines. For example:

www.mysite.com/ /news /products /category-1 /category-2 /blog /about /contact

4. Eliminate duplicate content. This could be caused by the way your server is set up or how your CMS serves up content. Either way, this needs to be addressed. We’ll cover how to fix the most common duplicate content issues later on.

5. Ensure you’re targeting the appropriate keywords for your business objectives. Just as successful advertising campaigns contain content that appeals to a target demographic, successful websites need to focus on keywords that have the highest relevance to their target audience.

Google Sitemaps

You can help Google out by providing a sitemap file (called sitemap.xml) that lists all of your content and how often it’s updated. Visit the Webmasters webpage to provide Google with this information.

Duplicate pages are a bad thing, and making pages that specifically detect the Googlebot (Google’s web-crawling tool) and serve up something designed for it is an absolute no-no.

If you’re using a CMS such as WordPress, it’s worth having it create static versions of pages where possible. It’s not crucial – Google can handle dynamic pages these days – but it doesn’t hurt.

This text version makes it clear what’s being used to figure out your site’s content.

Where possible, it’s also preferable to have permalinks like ‘/products/fridges/dynatech-coolfreezepro/’ for pages, rather than addresses that end with things like ‘?page=42132’. Every scrap of data you give the crawler will boost your chances in search results.

As far as raw content goes, the most important thing is that your site uses the keywords that people search for.

Visit the Webmasters webpage again and request a copy of the data that Google’s search engine uses, then examine it. If your site doesn’t use the phrase ‘humane spider catcher’, Google won’t direct people looking for those words to your site.

That sounds obvious, but content in frames, videos, pictures, pulled from Twitter or generated on the fly can be left out.

After that, the challenge is to get good links to boost your authority.

SEO explained

These are straightforward tips, but SEO is really pretty simple – the people who claim otherwise have something to sell you. Never be tempted to pay for dodgy tricks.

In most cases they don’t work, will only send worthless traffic rather than actual readers, and could well come back to bite you later on.

Much as exercise and a good diet are the only way to lose weight, good content is the only true way to achieve a good Google rank.