Search Engine Updates

search engine updates

Google Caffeine live.

Posted by Rik Stewart June 9th, 2010

Back in August we blogged about the news, from Google, of an update to its architecture. Since then there has been much speculation in the industry about whether or not it was already live. Yesterday Google announced the official launch of its “Caffeine” update.
In Google’s own 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.”

Google’s head of spam also explained the update at an SMX advanced session captured on video for Search Engine Land. Matt’s key points in summary were:
Caffeine…

Instead of crawling millions of documents in one day and then pushing it live hours later – with the caffeine update Google can crawl documents and immediately put them into the index to be served live seconds later. So the entire index becomes closer to real time.

Increases Google’s ability to scale up the capacity of its index (In the official Google blog post it says that Caffeine already uses nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage!)

Makes it easier for Google to annotate documents with information.

As this is an update to Google’s infrastructure, it should not affect rankings.

Tags: caffeine, Google, search, search engine updates, SEO

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Google "Mayday" update – the death of long tail traffic?

Posted by Rik Stewart June 1st, 2010

Will the most recent Google update kill long tail traffic?

At the end of April/start of May, many webmasters noticed a change in traffic from Google to their sites. Many people posting on the Webmaster World forum saw that they had large drops in long tail traffic (traffic from keyword phrases of 3 or more words). On the 3rd of May Search Engine Roundtable posted an article entitled Google MAYDAY Update Hitting Long Tail Ranking? that summarised the discussions.

During the questions and answers section of a panel at Google I/O, Google’s developer event, Vanessa Fox took the opportunity to ask Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, what was happening. Matt said that “this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back”. Google also told Vanessa that this had been a change to rankings and not a change in crawling or indexing.

Is long tail search, then, dead? In my opinion, not really. The key here is quality. According to Vanessa Fox (and the general buzz around the industry), the update mainly seems to be affecting pages that are deep within the navigation of sites and that don’t have high numbers of inbound links. These also tend to be pages that are not given much attention in terms of content and optimisation. So the answer probably is (as is often the case), that if you want a page to rank, you have to invest some time in content optimisation and promotion.

Tags: Google, long tail, mayday, search, search engine updates, SEO

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