That’s right. We’ve reached a new, depressing landmark in global warming history. A nation has finally superseded the United States in terms of total green house gas emissions.

China’s modern industrial revolution paired with a socialist government that lacks the incentive to initiate and enforce environmental controls has led to the birth of an environmentally unfriendly monster.

You can read news reports of a giant smog cloud created by China that is slowly creeping across Asia and on its way to Europe. It’s blocking out the sun over the cities and towns it floats above, and even immerses them in a fog-like cloud of pollution. It’s sad really, looking at the satellite photos of the thing. What are we doing to planet earth?

But another question is, do we really have the room to point the finger at China? We’re not exactly innocent here when it comes to environmental awareness. And the United States is still, by far and above, the greatest contributor of global greenhouse gasses when you look at total historical amounts emitted. So where do we go from here? Can we trust that China will reform like we have done? Or do we have to take action?

This is one of the more popular questions amongst newbies in the PC building arena. I’ve been asked it many times over and have yet to find a good, short n’ sweet explanation of what it is that I could link to instead of explaining it myself each time. So I decided to make that link myself : )

To understand what over clocking is, you need to understand the basics of how a computer component operates. Essentially, what a processor, graphics card, or memory does is take a little bit of electricity, run a series of operations and calculations using that electricity, takes a bit more electricity, runs more operations and calculations, and so on and so forth. These are called “cycles”, and cycles are expressed in Hertz. That’s the “1.5GHz” reading you’re used to seeing on a computer’s spec sheets.

What over clocking does is force your computer to run more cycles in a given period of time. So, instead of performing 1.5 billion cycles, or 1.5 Gigahertz, you force your computer to run 2.5 billion cycles per minute, or 2.5 Gigahertz.

As complicated as it sounds, that’s really at it is. Simple enough, huh?

I’ve been working with a website for a few months now, and I noticed a peculiar thing. About half of the more prominent pages were missing from Google’s index while many of the obscure ones were making it. It didn’t make any sense.

But I just figured out why. The site owner was using a JavaScript menu system under his site-wide header. I thought it was nothing but HTML and style sheets. But when I checked the source, there I saw it.

In this case, it wasn’t that big a deal because the owner really only used the site in his store. But had he been more dependent on search engines, the results would have been disastrous. In most cases, Google cannot and will not follow links in JavaScript menus.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them. It means you had better have a damn good xml sitemap – because without one, every page that is only linked-to from your menu will not be in Google’s index and not be in any SERP. Not only is this bad for traffic, but Google also ranks sites higher that have more content – and if Google can’t see those pages, all that hard work writing that content goes down the toilet!

I’ve been asked this so many times that I could kill myself. The answer is simple. BANDWIDTH and SERVER RESOURCES.

If your website sees a lot of traffic or your site hosts a lot of data heavy content, or both for that matter, then you’re probably taking up a significant amount of bandwidth and cpu. And, depending on your hosting provider, you could really be overloading your shared server. What that means is your users will experience much longer load times and much slower download times. And if there’s any physical law of the internet, it’s that low load times = high bounce rate + high exit rate.

And you definitely don’t want those.

Moreover, your SERPS are also affected by your website’s load timings. Google times how long it takes for its spider to load up and scan your page. And if your site is significantly above average, Google will hurt your rankings. And the reason is simple. Google searchers don’t like to wait! So, Google will fill your spot with a much speedier website and move you down the ladder.

But, with all that being said, you really do need a ton of traffic or have to be hosting plenty of content for a dedicated server to make sense.

Link exchanging used to be one the single easiest and most cost effective method of seeing real results in your SERP rankings. It really didn’t even matter if the site you exchanged links with had anything to do with your topic. In those days, links were votes, and that’s all that mattered.

But times have changed.

If you still think you can get away with traditional link exchanging, think again. Google’s topic awareness algorithm is so advanced that it can (and already does!) categorize your website into one of thousands upon thousands of niches. And to go along with it, Google ranks how related those niches are to one another.

What this means is, if you exchange links with a site that really has nothing to do with your own site, you won’t get any credit at all. In fact, you’ll probably end up hurting your rankings. There’s not much evidence for this, but there IS evidence that Google is starting to crack down more and more on grey hat SEO techniques. And I can’t think of an easier grey hat technique to detect than exchanging links with a random website.