SEO Tutorial and Guide » Search Engine Optimization

‘Google Caffeine’ – Change in Indexing Infrastructure

Preeti Prakash — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:50:12 +0000

Since a long time, as Google was busy working on caffeine update, I was also busy with my married life. Today, as Google had announced the completion of caffeine, I also announce my come back here.

What does caffeine mean?

Faster search
Caffeine is a chemical compound which acts as a stimulant. Similarly, caffeine update is a stimulant for Google’s indexing infrastructure. When you a type a search query in the search bar of Google, caffeine – the stimulant, come into play and uplifts the pages residing on data centres quickly. This means that you will see search results much faster.

Old Google crawling and indexing was structured in layers. Some layers were indexed faster, while the main layer could be updated in a couple of weeks. This means that a bunch had to wait until the whole layer was processed and pushed live. This added a significant delay in when the page was crawled by Googlebot and when it was published. Caffeine resulted in a 50% fresher index.

Increased storage, means more amount of information
Seeing the future trends of internet space and increasing amount of content, Google has increased the storage capacity of its data center.

Increased flexibility
Caffeine offers more flexibility in storing documents. When Google stores a document, it stores various types of information along with it. E.g., which external pages link to it, what anchor text is used, etc. Now, it will be able to store much more type of details with a document.

One thing that came into light is that currently, Google was able to associate one page with only one country, but with caffeine update, it will be able to associate that page with several countries.

Note that this is not an algorithm change. It’s only the change in indexing infrastructure. So, there will not be any effect on rankings of websites.

What SEOs can do for it?
There is nothing you can do actually other than keeping your site fresh and updated.

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Which links do Google display with link query?

Preeti Prakash — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 13:25:47 +0000

I have seen many of my colleagues and friends checking backlinks in Google, and not getting satisfactory results. When you type a link query or link command in Google search box, it returns only a few links while Yahoo returns majority of them. Why is it so? Do Google recognize only few of them? No. It’s not like that. Google do recognize them, but it doesn’t want you to know that it recognizes them.

For Google, link command is link:www.askpreeti.com

For Yahoo, link command is linkdomain:www.askpreeti.com

Google have deliberately manipulated their back link query system so that it only lets you see a small percentage of backlinks that it recognizes.

The webmasters can view the backlinks of their site through webmaster tools interface. But one can’t view all the backlinks of third party site through Google.

Recently, Google announced an improvement in blogroll detection which further reduces the number of links displayed by link: query. According to it, if you are linked from the blogroll section of a blog or any other part of the page that doesn’t change with the content, you won’t show up in the results of link query. This is indicative of the fact that Google is emphasizing on contextual links that are relevant to the context of the blog or site. Advertorial links in footer or blogroll will not be given much weightage.

Thus, to increase your link popularity, create unique and impressive content for your website to which people will link naturally, rather than wasting time linking to lots of low quality sites. It’s the quality of links that matters most, not the quantity.

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What Google say about Keywords Meta Tag?

Preeti Prakash — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:26:54 +0000

In 1998, when Google came into existence, other search engines like Infoseek and Altavista were indexing sites using the keywords meta tag. But, keyword meta tag, being a webmaster controlled parameter, can be easily manipulated to stuff it up with irrelevant and undesirable keywords.

While not giving any advantage to keyword stuffing, Google came up with the idea of using external links to rank the websites. Webmasters, having the older conception in mind, believed that Google too uses the keyword meta tag.

Thus, since its inception, Google had never used the keyword meta tag, since people started to stuff it up with keywords even irrelevant to their website. Other search engines might use it but Google, which is the major source of traffic for websites, don’t bother about it.

Finally, after lots of confusions and contradictions, Google officially announced on their webmaster blog that they DO NOT use keyword or keywords meta tag for ranking in search results. Although this is an earlier known fact, but most of the SEOs didn’t believed it and they had the misconception that keyword tag plays a major role in getting higher rankings. It doesn’t solve any purpose other than helping your competitors to steal the keywords which you had chosen after putting in lots of time and efforts.

Google definitely use other meta tags, such as description tag, which is displayed in search results, if it is informative. So next time if some one uses your brand name in his keywords tag, don’t bother to sue him. It’s not going to benefit him or harm you in any way.

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What is the future of SEO in the world of ever-evolving search engines?

Preeti Prakash — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:16:10 +0000

Aaron Wall raised a question ‘Will SEO be dead within next two years?’

Future of SEO - Dead or Live?

Most of the SEOs are of the opinion “NO, SEO will continue till search engines continue to rank sites. Though the techniques used may change.”

I would say that SEO might be dead. As the search engines especially Google are changing the way they rank sites, SEO will not be needed anymore. Since its inception, algorithm of Google to rank sites has changed a lot. Earlier it used to rank sites based on the keywords in ‘keyword’ Meta tag. Later it made the use of this tag obsolete.

The latest algorithm is much intelligent which considers the demographics and geographical location of the user and the search history (if you are logged in your account). And in the future, it has plans of developing the search engine into a more intelligent machine which will show the results according to the intent of the person using it. So, I guess SEO comes in no way.

But yes, if SEO means to you reaching your targeted audience rather than just getting top rankings on search engines, then you have a long way to go. SEO (better to be called as online marketing) in the true sense, means making your site impressive and useful for customers. Building your brand and reaching your potential customers should be your motive.

Rightly quoted by Bob Massa:

“I believe anyone can be successful at online marketing or even traffic generation and search engine placement specifically, if they just stop looking for ways to trick machines and instead look for ways to connect with humans.”

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How to check backlinks of a website?

Preeti Prakash — Mon, 25 May 2009 10:05:49 +0000

After a long wedding vacation, I finally got settled in Mumbai with my hubby. Now I am trying to catch up with the SEO things. Checking backlinks of a website is a very common thing for an online marketer, but the problem arises when we are presented with different results using different techniques.

Missing links in Google’s link search

Google’s link command no longer shows all the sites linking to your site. It only shows a sample of the links pointing to your site. So these results are in no way indicative of the link algorithm used by Google to determine a page’s Page Rank.

For example, if you type link:www.askpreeti.com in Google’s search bar, it will not return all the sites linking to this domain.

It is believed that Google displays only link pages with Page Rank 4 or higher. This is not true. It can be verified by visiting some of the returned pages.

In order to check your website’s link popularity, you can use either of the following tools. These tools return link page alongwith the anchor text used for linking.

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