Search the original Google algorithm and show side-by-side comparisons to Caffeine.
Last week Google announced a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search, called Caffeine.
They also kidnly asked users to contribute in the effort of benchmarking the new technology providing some feedback on their searches through this URL:
http://www2.sandbox.google.com/
Anyway, a few days ago a new service has been released which compares in real time results from both Google and Google Caffeine: GoogleCompare.
I’m not going to explain any more about the service since it’s pretty straightforward: the whole thing has a funny retro-style, kind of coffe adverts from the ’50s. It’s quite funny. Then you just type your keyword and click on brew and you get a quick comparison eventually showing how SERPs have changed due to the new algorithm.
So how did your ranking changed due to the update? I’ve have not experienced any major change in my rankings. However search speed has increased a lot… I guess that was the main effort behind the development of Caffeine.
I’ll keep an eye on Caffeine for the next few days if anything changes…
Page loading time is a crucial factor when it comes to estimate page’s usability as well as search engine’s rankings and Google’s Adwords quality score.
according to this statement, Google is going to update its assessment policy . Page load time it is soon due to become an important factor requiring specific assessment and optimization from webmasters and SEOs.
In order to calculate page loading time, you might try Pingdom. Pingdom is an online utility which calculates pages text, images and scripts, giving you also some interesting suggestions about improvement.
However, besides any Google statement about quality score or rankings, it’s always good to think about you user’s experience on your website: nobody likes websites taking too long to load.
Considering both usability and rankings, this should be some general guidelines to be followed one assessing and optimizing page’s loading time:
Text and page structure should load and be completely visible within the first 3 seconds
Any other element of the page must be visible within the first 8 seconds
These are only thumb rules of course. Always cehck your page weight and loading times. Working on this side of on-page optimization can lead to interesting discoveries sometimes.
It seems that search engine are digging through Twitter more and more
. In the past few days a came across a few episodes which made me think about how much search engine are considering Twitter content as valuable enough to be included into their own search results.
Let’s take a look at Bing first. Try looking for Al Gore this query on Bing: the very first result will be it’s Twitter page with is real time twits. This entry comes also before his personal website. This has been also confirmed by a public statement from Bing published on its community page.
Something interesting happens with Google as well. A few days ago I posted a link to one of my websites I found and I wanted to share with my Twitter followers. Analytics record show the following as the very first visit on the website right after the link was published on twitter:
216.200.55.83 invx.com [01/Jul/2009:02:49:01 +0200] “GET /a HTTP/1.1″ 404 136 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” “-”
Clearly the page was just being crawled by Google. The link has not apperead anywhere else and it is not a fronpage or entry page for search engines on the website.
This it’s just another proof on how important Twitter is becoming in terms on search value. It’s not going to take long before Google itself will either buy or create its own real time search tool.
It’s basically the Bing version of Google Webmaster tools. According to Microsoft, Bing Webmaster Toolbox development will aim toboost user engagement and traffic to websites and web-based application. The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community, plus links to Webmaster and Developer community blogs and forums.
Compared to competitors like Google and Yahoo, I guess the community its the real bonus of the toolbox. The collaborative and collective help of users is way more valuable than any webmaster toolbox, especially when it comes to SEO and content optimizacion, considering how recently Bing has been released.
We all know SEO is not science: most of SEO practices come from direct experience or reliable source but there’s som much uncertainity that makes everything blend into doubts.
That’s the reason why advices coming straight from Matt Cutts or the Google webmaster blog should be taken definetely seriously. We’ve already seen Matt getting into certain topics put into the spotlight of the SEO community and giving useful (altough sometimes ambigous) insight.
This time he realeased a bunch of slides he presented to the 2009 San Francisco Wordcamp
Following is a resume of the main points he discussed:
Crawlers and PageRank algorithm
- Google spiders go crowling pages in a pagerank order: highest pagerank pages get crawled before pages with a lower pagerank
- Being relevant and reputable is the actual criteria that works behind the Page Rank
Keywords and content optimization
- When it comes to keywords, put yourself into the user shoes: think about what he would type in his search string
- Do not think about stuffing your pages with keywords: write naturally.
- ALT attribute are handy (3-4 relevant words)
WordPress
- Set your permalink to domain.com/post-title (setting -> reading -> custom permalink structure /%postname%/)
- Modify your titles and file names (urls) acconrding to the content
This is the powerpoint format. Slides are also available from Google Docs.