SEO Tutorial and Guide » Google

‘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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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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Why should I use Google Friend Connect?

Preeti Prakash — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 10:58:32 +0000

Google introduced Friend Connect to tap into the social networking community. It is very simple to use and apply on your website. For site owners, Google offers a snippet of code. Simply add the code to your website and get social features up and running. No need of programming required.

The site becomes more dynamic and enjoys the features of social networking. No need to remember more usernames and passwords. Simply sign in with your google, yahoo, aim or open id account.

You can connect with your friends on other networks while being at AskPreeti.com at the same time. You can make friends, join sites using friend connect, connect with other people who share similar interests. Currently, you can invite friends from Orkut and Plaxo, your contacts from Google Talk, or anyone by sending an email.

The settings screen appears as a pop-up window. You can browse through any sites you have joined without logging out. If you sign in with google id, you will remain signed in while switching from one google connect site to another, but if you sign in with your yahoo or OpenId you need to sign in again at each new site.

Join me on friend connect and get connected with the world.

If you like my content, bookmark it on social networks and subscribe to RSS feed. Share with your friends by sending them an email or IM right away from the below widget. Post me a comment to clarify your queries.

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Would you like to see your site’s favicon in Google search results?

Preeti Prakash — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 18:34:48 +0000

Hey, I just came across an exciting update going on in Google SERPs. A favicon along with search results! Crap, I don’t believe it. Till now, we were able to see favicon at two places only:

In browser tab.
In browser bookmarks/favorites.

Now it’s expected that Google search results too will display it.

Favicon in search results for site: command search

It was first noticed by Brian Ussery accidently. Some people said that it is a firefox extension that enables favicon in search results. But the favicon is hosted on google domain which confirms that it is something going on by our ‘beloved Googlers’. John Muller while replying to this discussion in Google Webmaster Group confirmed that they were doing some testing.

But then, who knows what’s up with Big G! May be in a few months we will be able to see it for all sites. IMHO, it will be nice to see favicon in search results as it will help in recognizing a site that was visited by someone once and he is not able to recall its domain name. He can easily identify it from favicon (a representation of a website) rather than by visiting every site in search results.

What you guys think about it? Would you like to see a favicon in search results?

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