There have been a lot of changes within the search industry lately.  One interesting change is that the Google is now incorporating real-time information within their search engine results pages. Google made this announcement earlier this month and these real-time results include tweets from Twitter and information from other sources such as Facebook, blogs, news articles, and more.

To see the real-time results within Google’s search results page, try conducting a search for a keyword that is popular, such as President Obama. Keep in mind that these live updates will not be displayed for every keyword that is searched. Below is an image of the scrolling area on the results page when I conducted a search for President Obama.  This scrolling area updates automatically as you view the page.

As you can imagine, there is way too much information circulating on the web and within social networks to include every bit of relevant information on the search engine results page. Therefore, Google states that they apply “its own measurements to those whose updates appear in real-time results. Retweets and the number of followers a person has factor into Google’s assessment of quality.” 

With this update, there are still a few questions. How useful is this information going to be for searchers?  When people conduct searches in Google, are they really looking for the latest news or conversations about that topic?  How accurate is the information displayed within this scrolling area on the page?  Will it encourage businesses to focus more heavily on online reputation management? How will this impact SEO and the race to get to the top of the page now that this scrolling box takes up some of that real estate on the page?

Here at MoreVisibility we’ve talked about the importance of incorporating social media into online marketing initiatives for quite some time now. With these recent updates, it is even more important than ever.

A few weeks ago one of our SEO team members wrote a great blog post about how Google may soon be including web page load time as part of their ranking algorithm.  As mentioned in the blog post, Google has provided a site dedicated to providing information about improving a site’s speed: http://code.google.com/speed/

Just this week we are seeing that Google is making another step toward helping webmasters improve the speed of their websites.  In Google Webmaster Tools under Labs, there is now an experimental section called Site Performance.  This new addition to Webmaster tools shows webmasters on average how long it takes their pages to load, how that compares to other sites, and how the load time has changed over time through a trending graph.  An example of this graph is shown below.

Other details provided in this section are example pages from the website and the time that it takes those example pages to load as well as suggestions of how to optimize those pages based on the Page Speed tool. Within the Site Performance section, webmasters can also download the Page Speed tool to help optimize their site for improved speed, which ultimately leads to a better user experience.
Its important to note that this data is an average and the load time of a website’s pages can vary based on a user’s location and network conditions.

As Google is trying to make their search engine as fast as possible, it is critical that webmasters evaluate and pay attention to the time it takes pages to load, and this new Site Performance section makes it much easier to monitor.

There has been quite a bit of news circulating within the Search industry lately, and some of this news may have an impact on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.  In case you haven’t heard, below is quick re-cap of two pieces of important information.

Back in August, I wrote a blog about Google’s Caffeine Update.  Recently, it was announced that this update will begin to be rolled out in 2010.  Not to worry, Matt Cutts reassured webmasters in his recent blog post that the improvements to Google’s indexing infrastructure won’t occur prior to January – after the holidays.  They will release Caffeine in one data center for monitoring, prior to the full roll out.

Previously there was a preview of Caffeine available.  This preview has now been removed and this Thank You note was kindly left:

“We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox”.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”
Stay tuned as this Caffeine update approaches!

Another important piece of information is that Matt Cutts announced that Google may be adding a new factor to the over 200 factors that are currently part of their organic ranking algorithm: website load time. If you’re currently an AdWords advertiser, you may be aware that page load time already plays a role in Quality Score. In an effort to improve searchers overall experience, this too may play a role with SEO in the future. If you are interested in finding out more about how to assess your pages’ speed, you can visit: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/.