After a year of testing, Google has released its newest search technology.  Google Caffeine is supposed to provide 50 percent fresher results as compared to the last index.  Now when you are searching for news, photos videos and websites, you will see links to more relevant content quicker.

Google says that this technology is necessary to keep up with the staggering amount of content that is created and uploaded to the Web each day.  People and businesses are posting more content through their own sites, blogs and social media channels than ever before.  Google wants to make sure that the most relevant content is posted when a searcher makes a query.  The new index is built with the future in mind.  It has the ability to re-index content quicker and lays a foundation for the growth of information online.  You can read the official post about Caffeine at Google’s own blog.

As this search technology rolls out, we will be keeping an eye to determine how this impacts search results..  Generally speaking, when Google makes a change like this, things will shift around for a little while, but then when all is sorted out, the best results are left standing.  With Google’s push to be indexing the most relevant content, this says to me that the sites with blogs attached, or frequent content updates will fare best.  Sites that remain stagnant in content will not benefit from this new technology.  To stay ahead of the curve, be sure that you are exploring all of the possibilities of frequent content updates.  Start a blog, engage in social media, update your website often and post pictures wherever you can.

Last week, Google officially announced on their blog that “we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed.” What does this mean to webmasters and practitioners of SEO? Not much really, when you take into account that most good SEOs already consider site speed to be a huge part of their optimization efforts. After all, the quicker your site loads, the easier it is for the search engines to get to the most important pages on a site. Site speed is obviously also good for user experience and keeping those bounce rates at a low level.

However, the reason it may be more prudent for the less fastidious SEO to speed up page load times is that the load times are now part of the algorithms in that even if you have a site with great content and inbound links, if your pages take forever to load, Google may see fit to not rank you as high. What are some of the basic housekeeping tips to speed up page load times?

Steps for speeding up a website include: Removing or minimizing CSS, JavaScript and tables where you can, minimizing redirects by making your application update URL references whenever resources change their location and trying to use the least amount of comments code. Google has even provided a list of resources to help webmasters with all of the page speed best practices: http://code.google.com/speed/.  

PageRank is something that many within the search engine marketing and optimization industry are familiar with. PageRank reflects Google’s view of the importance of web pages. Pages perceived as important receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear toward the top of the search results. 
 
Years ago, the “nofollow” attribute was introduced, which enabled webmasters the ability to tell search engines to not follow a specific link from a page.  This attribute essentially tells Google and other search engine spiders to ignore the link and not transfer any PageRank to the page it links to. This can even be used internally on websites to tell the search engines to not transfer PageRank to interior pages. This led to what is known as “PageRank sculpting” where webmasters started to manipulate how credit flows throughout their site.  With PageRank sculpting, webmasters could prevent losing valuable credit on links to unimportant pages and the credit that would have been given to those pages could be redistributed, providing the other links to more important page (those without the nofollow attribute) with more credit.  PageRank sculpting is done in theory to achieve higher rankings for internal pages of a website by not wasting credit on less important pages.

However in 2009, Google stated that using nofollow attributes will no longer allow you to redistribute credit.  Instead, if you use the nofollow attribute, let’s say on 5 links on your homepage, the credit for those 5 links will disappear. The credit that those 5 links would have received without the nofollow attribute will no longer be distributed to other links on this page. 

Since this is the case, it forces webmasters to think about the number and value of links they have on any given page.  If you have too many links on a page, and some of them are nofollowed, you’re essentially throwing away credit.  For search engines and users, you should ensure that the links you have, particularly on your homepage, are to valuable interior pages.  There may be times when you do want to include the nofollow attribute, such as for log-in pages, shopping cart pages, etc.  After all, there is no value in having these pages rank in the search results.  

Here is a link to a post on Matt Cutt’s perspective on the nofollow attribute and PageRank sculpting.  In general, it’s recommended to let PageRank flow throughout the site.  Focus on creating a site worthy of garnering quality links, and an architecture that is friendly for search engines and users.