Caffeine Update – Moogle Insights

Matt posts a quickie to inform the masses that the Caffeine Update is not, directly, a SERP change, but more of an update to the chassis of Google Work.

Although, there may be some SERP changes; so you should check ‘em out at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/.

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

More info on the Caffeine Update

August 10, 2009

in Google/SEO

via More info on the Caffeine Update.

Gleaned Insight from Google Patents in 2007

Tedster over at webmasterworld.com made some pretty astute observations of Google’s 2007 patent: Document Scoring Based on Link-Based Criteria.

The post discusses how often certain ‘areas’ of the page, such as footers, switch-out links to better detect paid linking. Many sites have relegated paid linking to footers and other segments of the page that seem natural.

The ambiguity of whether or not a page’s content should be updated on a regular basis is touched on, but is left just as ambiguous as ever. I think it’s common sense: If you have a news page, it should change quite frequently. If you have a statistics page, it should change as often as stats are measured. If you have a resource/reference page, then it should be updated ONLY as often as authoritative information changes.

I’m, personally, delighted to see that ‘partial indexing of pages’ is being given serious focus, if only briefly.

We all know, and have for some time, that the more inter-related terms a page ranks well for gives it better ranking for these terms, across-the-board.

I do, however, find that what is discussed about ranking ceiling, traffic throttling, and the yo-yo effect has some solid basis – as opposed to just giving SERP watchers something to complain about.

Enjoy!

Chat Man

clipped from www.webmasterworld.com Google’s Patent on Backlinks – many interesting clues from 2007 tedster With the current update apparently doing “something different” with backlinks, I went back for another reading of the 2007 patent application Document Scoring Based On Link-Based Criteria PAGE SEGMENTATION and RATES OF CHANGE Not only the back link juice itself is weighted differently, whether it changes is also given a different weight, depending on where the link appears on the page PAGE CHANGES CAN IMPROVE OR LOWER RANKINGS …it all depends on the query terms! PARTIAL INDEXING OF PAGES search engine may store “signatures” of documents instead of the (entire) documents themselves to detect changes to document content. RANKING FOR SEVERAL SEARCHES RANKING CEILINGS, TRAFFIC THROTTLING and the YO-YO EFFECT Google may allow a ranking to grow only at a certain rate, or apply a certain maximum threshold of growth for defined period of time.

Indexing Audio Content: 5 Questions About Google’s Latest Strive

CitizenTube.com reported on how the ‘Barack Roll’ gained the momentum that it did, thanks to Google’s Election Video Search Gadget.

Now, the technology that spurred a whole new on-line political arena is open to the masses, for the most part.

I will ponder the following questions (you’re more than welcome to ponder with me!):

1. How long before spammers take advantage of this search technology?
2. Will this really give Google the edge it needs to maintain ‘top dog’ status?
3. How long will it be before others institute similar capabilities?
4. How long, really, will it be before this search method produces reliable, relevant results?
5. How is this advancement going to affect text searching? (sometimes I just want a song’s lyrics – not the artist, not the EBay page, just good ‘ol fashioned lyrics in text form. Will I still get the results I expect?)

Hmm… I wonder…

Chat Man

clipped from googleblog.blogspot.com Google Audio Indexing now on Google Labs 9/16/2008 12:07:00 PM Nearly two months ago, we introduced the Google Elections Video Search gadget on iGoogle, a tool that transcribes and indexes the spoken content on YouTube’s Politicians channels. It didn’t take long for folks to find some creative ways to use it! Now it’s possible to enjoy this technology in a bigger way: We just launched Google Audio Indexing (aka GAudi) in Google Labs. The dedicated site offers more features, such as “search within video” and “sharing,” and a more robust user interface.   As with all things in Labs, we will continue to experiment with new features. So whether you care about flip-flopping, the glass ceiling, change or taxes, we’ll keep working to provide the most relevant results for you. Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product Manager

Google Penalty Facts

TheGoogleCache recently posted a rather insightful article on the misperceptions around Google penalties.

The simple fact of the matter is, Google ‘penalties’ are penalties for a reason. The reason Google imposes penalties is to keep their SERPs clean of web-negative sites, to offer a variety of relevant results to the end user, and to promote a ‘healthy web.’ Web-negative sites (malware/spam sites) and irrelevant results in Google SERPs will make people use another Search Engine – Why would Google give up their ‘bread and butter’ so easily?

One easy way to figure if your site is penalized is to review the ToS and highlight any terms that your sight may be violating, then fix to comply.

Just because your site doesn’t rank well, doesn’t mean you’re penalized; and this is important to keep in mind.

clipped from www.thegooglecache.com Google Penalty Myths Is your site suffering a penalty? It is far too easy to attribute your site’s poor rankings to a penalty when, more often than not, another more straight-forward answer is available. penalties normally impact webmasters who undertake egregious steps to optimize their site: comment spam, forum spam, guestbooks, poor cloaking, etc. Even then, most of the time these links are simply devalued. penalties are normally only diagnosable when all other ranking factors appear in order. Is your site as old, have as many links, or as quality content as your competitors? penalties normally impact sites in obvious ways. Did your site drop from the index altogether (ban)? Did all of your rankings drop in a uniform manner (# penalties)? Or were several keywords impacted and drops greater than 500+? Unless some mix of the above list are true, chances you are not suffering a penalty. A couple of issues are more likely at play

Googleopoly?

Google Maps, Reader, Lively, Mail, et cetra, et cetra, et cetra. But Wait! There’s More:

Well, well. ‘Google Chrome.’ You’ve heard of it, yes? I ponder…

 

Speed, security, open source. How Google has put these three in-line with each other is a bit beyond me, but my limited test run with Chrome shows *significant* speed increases, so I can safely say that I’ll play with it a bit.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to write about it’s best, and worst, features. Although, the idea of a browser’s performance moving me to write is a bit, well… disconcerting. But those are the breaks, right?

Anyhoo, the point of my posting anything regarding a browser is because of two things: (1) It’s a Google product (Hello! If this thing hits big and I ignored it, I’d look a bit ’steewpid,’ to say the least.), and (2) Rendering concerns.

Google said:

Google Chrome uses the same open source rendering engine as Apple’s Safari browser (WebKit), so your landing pages and sites should appear in Google Chrome as they do in Apple Safari. The way users interact with ads and sites should be similar as well.

Ensuring that your site renders correctly in Safari is a good indicator that GChrome will navigate your site just fine, but I recommend trying it out to be sure. If GChrome takes off (and I’ve very little reason to believe that it won’t) and you haven’t prepared for it, you’ll only be cutting off your nose to spite your face, in essence.

Thanks for dropping by and please leave comments of any kind regarding GChrome – it should be interesting to watch unfold.

Chat Man

clipped from googleblog.blogspot.com A fresh take on the browser 9/01/2008 02:10:00 PM At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

Flash Still Has its Place

SERoundtable checks out a Google Group topic regarding Flash and Google’s recent announcement of its new Flash indexing capabilities.

Even though G has made some significant steps toward indexing flash, there’s plenty of opinion that *depending* on flash content to be indexed may not be the best basket to put all your eggs in.

clipped from www.seroundtable.com A new Google Groups thread takes a new look at how Google handles Flash content. In the thread Beu was able to bring back a former Googler, Bergy, to respond to some of these questions. Bergy’s general recommendation is still to avoid using Flash when possible: My advice is the same advice I’ve given for a good long while: Build your site first in HTML. Style it using CSS. If you must, do simple user interaction in Javascript. If you cannot resist, include multimedia content in Flash. However, remember that each of the standards evolved into their role for a reason, and while other technologies have fallen by the wayside, Flash fills the niche for highly interactive and multi-media experiences on the web. Don’t use it for something when there’s already a standard whose output can be easily parsed, easily processed, and whose openness makes its processing easier for browsers and searchbots.

Google Entertains “Negative Keyword” Idea

JohnMu, acclaimed Googler, considered the usefulness of ‘negative keywords,’ but is unsure of feasibility.

Add your thoughts to the conversation!

clipped from groups.google.com JohnMu View profile �More options Aug 28, 3:56�pm Hi everyone Just so that I understand you all correctly, this list of negative keywords is not something that Webmaster Tools would provide, but rather something that you would provide, is that correct? I think that’s an interesting idea, but I’m not sure if it would be something that would be feasible. Are you currently having trouble that your site is showing up for searches where you don’t want to be found? If so, it would be great if you could start a thread in the crawling, indexing & ranking sub-group here so that we could look at it! John

Recovering from a Google Shakedown

Malinkam poses a great question to members of Webmaster World Forums regarding the best way to recover a site’s rankings in Google.

Points to consider noted by members are:

1 Know the causes of the drop in rankings. Don’t make the same mistake twice!

2 Domain age. A site with significant age may be better off cleaning as opposed to starting from scratch.

3 Site Size. Smaller sites are easier to move to a new domain; larger sites may pose a few challenges.

4 Consider the TLD extension.

I think server platforms could make a difference, too, but that’s just me. Do you think there are other factors to consider?

Post a comment with your thoughts!

Chat Man

clipped from www.webmasterworld.com Switching from .org to .com in hope of recovery malinkam #:3732779 If site A (example.org) looses ranking, and we open Site B (example.com) would the penalty or filter or whatever this thing is end up in Site B? 1 of our sites, “example.org” vanished from Google on June 4, running out of options what else can be done to recover lost traffic (well, not totally vanished, just lost about 80% traffic). We also own “example.com” which we never used for content. All the content and inlinks are located on .org site. Would you still ride this thing out or do such a drastic move? Would google treat the new .com as a brand new site?

PageRank: Reading Between the Lines

I found the following post by Kevin Ryan and couldn’t help but get a bit tickled by it’s irony. Well, that is, the irony that I found in it, but my humorometer is a bit skewed from the ‘median’ norm. 

Anyhoo, obvious sense is obvious sense. PageRank, and it’s weight in overall page ranking for specific queries, is near moot. (Okay, maybe ‘moot’ is a bit strong, but you get the picture, eh?) PageRank is a direct measurement of incoming links to your site and it’s pages, this is true, but it’s far more important to note that it is a weighted factor. A small site, heavily targeted on a niche phrase and supported by varying, relevant, original content can, very easily, dominate a SERP with a PR of 1; while a PR 4-5 site may not be able to achieve first, or second, page results on a moderately competitive term.

I like to track page rank for one reason and one reason alone: When PR shifts, it’s usually due to overall Google shifts, not just my site.

If PR jumps or shifts (on any site, not just your own), one could expect the SERPs to follow. But there’s no certainty in saying that a PR shift will affect your traffic, as noted by David Naylor’s personal experience.

clipped from searchenginewatch.com   Rehabilitating SEO   By Kevin Ryan, Search Engine Watch, Aug 27, 2008 I caught up with David Naylor after the event to discuss ways of improving behavior The New Age When considering how your SEO time is spent, what’s important and what isn’t so important? PageRank Obsession Because (Toolbar) PageRank is only updated (roughly) quarterly, don’t waste time checking it at a higher frequency. Getting upset over changes in your site’s ranking may be a bit overplayed as well. Naylor notes that his site’s rank has fluctuated up and down in the last 12 months, yet his traffic has remained the same.

Would I Suggest Google?

Google Suggest started a rippling of chatter yesterday, as well as a few forums reporting possible shifts in SERPs and ranking factors of Googlrithms. 

Do the two have anything in common, or are the two strictly exclusive?

Data compilers may enjoy this next G-shift, as it appears to be multi-pronged.

As always, thanks for stopping by!

Chat Man

clipped from www.google.com Today we’re excited because Google Suggest will be “graduating” from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. Over the next week, we’ll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box. We find that by providing suggestions upfront, we can help people search more efficiently and conveniently. Below are some great ways Google Suggest can help simplify your searching.