In April 2017, Redditors made a compelling argument against blurred pillarboxing. The primary complaint of this approach is that it increases the file size, which poses a challenge for mobile devices where data is scarce and expensive, thereby increasing the load time. Additionally, pillarboxing makes the video smaller and difficult to see.

Discover a lightweight, responsive solution to vertical videos

Last week I received an email from a client outlining an issue they were encountering with Amazon’s Route 53 health checks which lead to a discovery about how Amazon’s string based health checks operate and how that can create issues with the performance monitoring tool New Relic.

Learn how to avoid issues configuring Route 53 health checks with New Relic

Search engines are powerful tools, yet it is surprisingly simple to provide direction to search engines and ensure that content is shown (and hidden) appropriately in search results. Likewise, it is surprisingly easy to make mistakes and instruct a search engine to show (or hide) content unintentionally. Understanding the basic tools that search engines provide allows website administrators to instruct search robots to ensure that important content appears in search results, and avoid making costly mistakes.

Discover how to control search engine crawling and indexing behavior

Canonical links are frequently misunderstood by developers, marketers, content authors and SEOs. When used correctly, rel=canonical is a powerful tool that can improve search results for visitors. However, when used incorrectly, canonical links can be detrimental to search results, and may in some cases be ignored by search engines entirely.

Discover why Google may be indexing your canonicalized pages

Faceted navigation is the collection of UI elements and functionality which provide the ability to filter and refine category views. There is some debate in the SEO, UX and general web development communities about the best way to present faceted navigation in the URL.

Faceted navigation, such as filtering by color or price range, can be helpful for your visitors, but it’s often not search-friendly since it creates many combinations of URLs with duplicative content.

– Faceted navigation best (and 5 of the worst) practices

The correct way to denote facets in a URL is through the use of query parameters. However, some believe that virtual subdirectories present a better alternative for SEO and UX. We’ll compare the different options for including facets in a URL, starting with simplistic examples of each method.

Learn how to best structure faceted URLs for SEO and UX