The Dhiti content discovery service: Some frequently asked questions
We are happy to be receiving a very good response from publishers and bloggers to our content discovery service. At Dhiti, our vision is to provide hassle-free products that improve the reading experience on the content web. In this article, we’d like to address some frequently asked questions about our service.
1) Do you recommend only articles from the given hosted site in your widgets?
Yes. As of now, we only recommend articles from the publisher’s site. A publisher does have the control to extend this to a family of sites from his publisher network. Some sites like Hindustan Times have asked for this feature, and we are open to requests from other sites for this.
2) Do your widgets cause any load on the hosting servers?
Content discovery algorithms take a lot of CPU. This is why it has been restricted to big publishers who could afford the extra load. At Dhiti, due to our cloud-based solution, we do all the compute on our servers and ensure your servers dont take any extra load (but to serve the extra pageviews we can give you). The content we show in our widgets is directly pulled from our servers from the user’s browser. The reader sees no difference in experience – since our widgets absorb the same css settings from your page.
3) Do your widgets cause latency in page loading?
Latency is the biggest cause for user dissatisfaction. While we strive to make our service fast so as to not cause latency concerns, we go a step further. We load our widgets asynchronously, well after the rest of your page’s elements are loaded. This ensures that our widget is loaded after your page and your content is fully rendered by the browser. You may see our network connections being initiated a little later, but this causes no visual delay for your reader.
4) Do your widgets affect SEO?
Most of our widgets are loaded using script tags. Our content is rendered directly on the browser using Ajax. The related article recommendation widget does not contribute to SEO.
If you are also using our hubs feature, the hub pages will get indexed by search engines. When search engine bots visit the hubs, we send them the content – so they can index and make the pages discoverable on user searches.
5) Do you do user cloaking? (In other words, do you send different content for a search engine and for a user?)
Search engines dont understand javascript. To ensure content in your hub pages are properly indexed, when a bot visits the hub pages – we send them rendered pages. When a user visits the same hub page, the pages are rendered using Ajax on the browser. So both bots and your readers see the same content in the end. For end users, we use script tags and ajax for rendering. We do this to ensure low latency for your users, and no extra load on your servers.
If you are concerned about this, and want the same HTML to be presented to both search engines and readers, and dont mind the extra latency – you can disable the “Render using Ajax” option in your console.
6) Why do you use redirects for the recommended links?
Users are the ultimate deciders of relevance. If we present 3 articles to them, and they always pick the second one – its a clear indicator of their preference. We wish to use this in our ranking to ensure we present the most relevant articles at all contexts. To learn about user preferences, we send ourselves a signal – through the redirect.
The redirect also helps the publisher/ blogger know how well we are performing on his site. Look into your Google Analytics for traffic referred by http://dive.dhiti.com/redir.
7) Will Google ban my site because of using Dhiti?
Absolutely not. Dhiti does fair play. It is meant to improve user experience, and uses no illegal methods to boost traffic on the site. Dhiti does not steal SEO juice as well – and mostly renders links using Ajax. Dhiti uses best practices, believes in good SEO, and wants to make good content win. The techniques used by Dhiti for rendering are also industry standard.