The Search Marketing Expo in Seattle announced this week that Google’s “Caffeine” is now live. Caffeine is a new and highly anticipated web indexing system. This new indexing system promises at least 50% fresher results to SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
If you’re like me, you’re never exactly sure what goes on behind the closed doors of Google, but I know we’ve been accustomed to having something new indexed maybe twice a month. It used to be much worse than that: Consider this…
On 9-11, that infamous day in 2001, Google News didn’t even exist. In fact, it had only been around for about three years. But as news that day was being made and posted quicker than had ever been before, the search engines weren’t coming even close to indexing it and making it available. And it wasn’t just Google, all the news sites were in the same boat. Enter Google News—with a focus on immediacy of news delivery.
It’s hard to believe, but we used to think that 30-day indexing was good. Wow – hard to believe. Now, with Caffeine, Google will crawl the Web, in a fractional, systematic way, and index stuff “on the fly.” One blogger recently did a test. He posted a story with an unusual word in the headline title. He found the story found its way into Google’s search results within one minute. This is very good news. But don’t really excited just yet, because there are other factors involved in the search results. Google will look at factors like your Page Rank and “relevance” to determine which sites to index more quickly.
The good news is that news sites AND blogs are thought to be crawled and indexed more quickly than other website. Can you say Hooray for all of us bloggers!
Take a look at this site: PubSubHubbub which is an open-source tool that blogs are now able to use to ping Google when the blog is updated. These are exciting times, indeed, to be living and working online!
How do you expect Google’s Caffeine to impact your business?
Thanks for the update! Hard to think of life pre-internet. I’m online all the time. Not sure how Caffeine will help, but I do hope our blogs will get indexed more quickly.
Evelyn
I’ve noticed the same thing both with my blog posts and my tweets showing up nearly instantly in Google. I love how much faster things are moving now and I do think this is great for small businesses that are blogging. One benefit is that it will allow us to blog about what’s currently in the news and get our thoughts out there fast enough to catch the traffic surge on that topic while it’s is still “news” instead of the post being indexed a week or two or three later when it’s not being searched for or talked about anymore.
Hi Jeanne,
Wow! That’s some news. I seriously didn’t realize that about Google News and 9/11. Very interesting.
I have read quite a bit about Caffeine, though. And just this morning I saw a video of Matt Cutts talking about the new algorithm they implemented last month that a lot of people are calling “Mayday” because of the shake up. Some of my sites lost a little ground for a while, but they’re climbing back up the ranks.
Btw, I have now written two posts about Google Analytics, per your request (thanks for that). And, I replied to your comment/question on email notification for comments, on my blog. Just search plugins for the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin by By Mark Jaquith. It’s what I use and it works great.
Missed your posts off and on for a bit a while back. Are you blogging elsewhere from time to time or…?
Hugs!
Hi Deb,
I now have the plugin you recommended installed.
Does this mean that when I’m replying now, you are being notified?
Just checking. Please email me at jkolenda@sc.rr.com and let me know if you are notified.
Or, do you have to subscribe to it?
Thanks so much.
Jeanne
Like a good cuppa java, it hits quick!
Just wondering…what do you think the real benefit of it will be?
Trivia: did you know that the MINIMUM speed a tachyon travels at is the speed of light? 🙂
Mtn Jim
Well, Mtn Jim, I actually DID know that about the speed of tachyons! I guess it’s my science background. I think it was something about quantum field theory…one professor gave the example of a squirrel that was moving between two knot-holes in two side-by-side trees. How fast would the squirrel have to move before you would see its face in both holes? Hmmmm… about the speed of a tachyon, which at the speed of light would be so fast we would see a double image. Thanks for all the memories!
As to the benefit of Google’s Caffeine. The most obvious is that everything we do would be indexed quickly.
Thanks for stopping by.
Jeanne
Thanks Jeanne – great to be kept informed. sue
Thanks for stopping in, Sue. It’s nice to see you here, although we talk everyday!
Jeanne
Hi Jeanne,
My blog is on the WordPress platform and I just fund the plugin to do this PubSubHub connection. Thanks for the information. Will keep a look out to see if my blog post are indexed quicker.
Thanks so much,
Kevin
I wish I had the skills to create the Green Tea version. Thanks for this info and the super cool tip for the plugin. Are there other search engines close to this much power? Has anyone done a comparison?
Hey Jeanne,
Cool that you remembered tachyons! I love how they “break the rules” on speed limits…:-)
I sometimes get confused between features and benefits. Seems “quick indexing” would be a feature…so what do you think the primary benefit of quick indexing would be?
Thanks,
Mtn Jim
p.s. this thing about anti-matter bugs me…;-)
Mtn Jim,
Did you see the movie about anti-matter – Angels & Demons? That was wild!
I think for me the benefit of quick indexing would be that the small business clients that I am marketing for (blogging, article marketing, Tweeting, etc.) would see quicker results and would think I’m even more of a hero than they already do :0) What do you think?