Google gets a Caffeine Hit.

June 18th, 2010 by Steven.Wade

Google gets a Caffeine Hit

On the 8th of June 2010 Google announced a new web indexing system called caffeine. In basic terms Google has rewritten their infrastructure that deals with how they collect sites for their index. On a side note here is a cool video that Matt Cutts created to explain how Google works.

So what does Google caffeine actually mean?

This type of Google infrastructure update is nothing new. Back in 2005 Google did a similar infrastructure update called “Big Daddy”. Well this has happened again, this is due to the popularity of social media contents on the internet and Google needs to meet the demand. Google’s old way of indexing sites was via flat index layers also known as main index and supplementary indexes. Their new way of indexing is to analyze small proportions of the web and update their search index on a continuous basis, which is why they needed to improve their infrastructure.

Below is a great image from the Google Blog which shows the difference between their old way of indexing and their new way.

With Google caffeine they have improved the Googlebot speed and the size of the data stored amongst many other improvements.

Google Caffeine lets Google index web pages on an Amazing scale. In fact, every second Google’s Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel.

Here’s a quote from Google’s Blog about the amount of data Caffeine consumes “If this (Caffeine Processed pages) were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.” pretty amazing you have to agree.

This is a major roll out as its estimated that Google owns over 1 Million servers, and here’s some interesting facts its estimated that Google owns 2% of the whole worlds servers, and that they install 100,000 servers per quarter.

What does this mean for SEO.

Well Google have stated that this isn’t an algorithmic change so effectively nothing should change SEO wise but with all these pages being indexed faster there is going to be a whole lot more competition for your site, which makes it more important to keep on top of your SEO.

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The Google Indexation Cap

February 4th, 2010 by Steven.Wade

The Google Indexation Cap, What it is and why it exists.

The Google Indexation Cap, What it is and why it exists: Introduction

You may or may not be aware that your site will not always get 100% indexed by Google. This is due to a quality filter that SEOs have named the Google indexation Cap.

So what is this Google Indexation Cap and how does it affect your site?

Well that’s the big question as with most of Google’s algorithms, they are not very vocal about telling people what they are and how they affect your site. Which is why Google is the biggest search engine on the planet, and how they control spam in their index better then any other search engine.

Well in simple terms the Google indexation Cap means that Google will not fully index poor quality sites. They will include a percentage of the site in their index hence the name Indexation Cap. So with all this in mind how do you over come this filter.

Here are some tips of over coming the Google Indexation Cap Filter.

1. Build a quality site

This may sound obvious to people, but you’ll be amazed at how people interpret the word quality. A quality site means good size informative articles or quality information about your given industry. The better quality the contents is on your site the more likelihood that people will naturally link to you and people will return to your site. This is a major thing in Google s eyes as they see that your site is being of great value to users, which means Google will start to trust your site more and more.

2. Drop the hard sell.

Don’t have too many ads on your site. You don’t want your site to look like a formula one drivers jumpsuit. If you focus on providing a quality experience to a user instead of trying to sell them anything you can, you will experience a boost from Google as this is a major goal of theirs to provide users with the most relevant information and a good experience. This in turn makes Google more money as their search engine results become more relevant and when you are helping Google to reach their goals they will flood you with relevant traffic as a thank you.

3. Page Rank.

Page Rank is a major factor of how Google apply the Indexation Cap to your site. If your site has a high page rank and it is well distributed amongst all your pages in your site, Google will then apply less of the Indexation Cap against your site and more of your web pages will appear in the Google Index. Google’s Page Rank has given an extra job of deciding the indexation of a site away from its original design which was for ranking websites.

4. Unique Contents.

Again this is a major factor of Google’s Indexation Cap. If your site contains little if not any unique content then Google may apply a more tougher indexation filter on your site. This is again a quality issue for Google, picture the scene you search in Google for your term, click search and the top 10 results are all the same article. How long do you think Google will last as the number 1 search engine with results like that! Again help Google and Google will help you. Remember your not trying to beat Google as this will always end up in tears and not Google’s, work with them to provide the best user experience as you can. One statement Google released which said around the lines of, if you did a search in Google for your Keyword and we return more then 1 result we have failed. This means they are aiming to be highly relevant to users and to show only quality sites.

5. Deep Links to your site.

Deep linking simply means instead of people linking to your site like this www.yoursite.com they link to a specific page like this www.yoursite.com/specificpage.html. This is another key factor for Google as they see people are linking to your contents which in turn must mean that your contents is useful and of great quality, and in turn will spread page rank to the specific pages instead of you feeding page rank to your inner pages you can do this via deep linking.

The Google Indexation Cap: Conclusion

If your site is of great quality and is providing a fantastic user experience then you will have no problems with the Google Indexation Cap. If you are constantly doing SEO tasks on your site you will be naturally overcoming any Indexation Cap filters that Google are applying to you. The key is constant and clear SEO work on your site and quality contents.

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