Posts In Search Engine Optimization

Google Caffeine Goes Live!

Yeah... You read it right! After almost an year of speculation, Google has finally announced the completion of Caffeine, its new web indexing system in an official blog post.

In their words, “Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered. Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before ”

Caffeine – How does it Work?

When you search Google, you are not searching the entire web. You are just searching all the web pages indexed by Google crawlers (which more or less includes all of the web). But what it doesn't include is the pages launched in real-time. For example, you wouldn't be able to find content that was updated a few minutes back until Google crawlers index it!

And at the speed at which content is being added on the world wide web, information is not just increasing in size but also proliferating in variety with videos, images, news, real-time updates by people and so on. The average web page has become much more complex than it was earlier! And so grows the user-impatience.

While searchers want to find th latest information, publishers want their content to be found immediately after they post it!

This is where Caffeine comes in! Now, content can be searchable within seconds after its crawled!

Google illustrates the difference its old indexing system and Caffeine with an image:

The old indexing system worked as a batch process. Google bots used to crawl a set of pages and process all of them before adding to the index. And since it was a continuous process, all the pages of the batch had to wait for the entire batch to be processed before they could be made live. Thus, there was a huge time gap between content crawling and its availability in search results. But with Caffeine, Google processes smaller portions of information. With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and updates the index on a continuous basis, globally. This means new content makes it to the index a great deal faster!

But remember, Caffeine doesn't hasten the crawling schedule. It only means that the crawled web pages are available to users much more quickly!

Google Mayday Update - 4 Tips To Get Over It!

Google has always been surprising us with new features and tweaks. But this May, it played a different game that left online marketers and search engine optimizers in a complete frenzy!

Google makes minor tweaks and updates to its algorithm every now and then. But around April 28th to May 3rd, many websites started noticing an abrupt loss of long tail search traffic. This algorithm change was thus christened 'Google Mayday Update.'

According to Google's Matt Cutts, this is yet another algorithm update as part of the quality changes that seek to deliver the best and most relevant results for user searches. Though he dismisses allegations that it has anything to do with Google Caffeine, he does admit that it affects long tail searches more than head searches.

If you have seen a drop in traffic to your website, the first thing to do is - Don't Panic! Don't try to change things blindly lest you do damage to yourself in the process!

How to Cope with the Mayday Update?

Check your Traffic – Evaluate your search referral traffic between April 28th and may 3rd and see if there have been any significant drop in the figures. Also ascertain there is change in the number of referrals or the number of pages getting traffic. If you notice a heavy drop in the pages getting long tail search traffic, then you can be sure you're hit by the Mayday maven!

Examine your Links – Examine the links of your website and run a quality check. Spend some time and effort to gather a few high-quality links to spruce up your website.

Add Great Content – As Matt Cutts points out, the update is just means to ensure relevancy in the search results. So you need to focus on making your website more relevant for those search phrases. Start by sprucing up the content on those pages. Add more rich and relevant content that not only attracts search spiders but would be more useful for your users!

Establish an Authoritative Image – Authoritative websites have better chances of ranking in Google SERPs or so it is seen! So do all that you can to establish an authoritative image of yourself online. This includes creating great content, optimizing for search engines as well as on social media channels and generally strengthening your online reputation.

Finally... don't panic! Google makes more than 400 changes to its algorithms every now and then. While some go unnoticed, some create a mild stir on the web. It is important to remember that behind all these updates, Google works with an aim of delivering better and more relevant search results. So you focus on what you can do best – Offer great content about your area of expertise!