Have you seen possible Caffeine effects in use? Tell us about it.

Back before the holidays, Google made it a point to assure everybody that Caffeine would not be rolled out (except for at one data center) until after the holidays were over – January at the earliest. The reason for this was that Google didn’t want to shake everything up during a key time for businesses (they didn’t want a repeat of the Florida update).

The company let everyone know about its intentions at PubCon in November. In fact, a few days ago, Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video running through his presentation from that event on his blog. He also provided the slideshow. It covers much more than just Caffeine, but if you missed it, you may want to consider watching it anyway (Caffeine discussion starts at about 22:10 in the video and at slide 29 in the presentation).

"It’s a re-write of our indexing infrastructure. It’s taking the old way that we used to index things that we’d crawled around the web, and we’re replacing that with new architecture that’s fresh and that had been written to be more scalable, more flexible, [with] the ability to attach different types of data, and in the process of indexing, the ability to do more documents for a more comprehensive version of the web, and the ability to do it faster," Cutts says of Caffeine.

But enough background. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld forum thread where administrator Tedster claimed to have seen Caffeine in action at a number of IP addresses. He wrote:

I’m seeing the Caffeine data-set being served via this set of IP addresses: 64.233.169.147, 64.233.169.105, 64.233.169.103, 64.233.169.104, 64.233.169.99,64.233.169.106

It seems to take 5 IP addresses to build the complete SERP, where in the past it often took only 3.

Schwartz also pointed to another member’s post (Whitenight), who said:

Well, just tripled checked with offices/employees in Texas, Colorado, and Indiana. All 5 "control" keywords/sites showed live Caffeine.

That member’s latest post says that the Caffeine Dataset is also on http://66.102.7.99 and http://66.102.7.104.

We don’t know for sure if this is all really Caffeine in action though. Google hasn’t commented on it, and has not made any announcements regarding Caffeine since what Matt said above. Some people don’t believe this is Caffeine at all. As Schwartz notes, we’ll have to wait for Google to say something.

Still, January is almost over, and Google said it would wait until after the holidays, specifically mentioning the month of January. It’s about time for this to be rolling out to some extent. Speed has been emphasized a significant amount in Caffeine discussion, and Cutts told us that page speed would likely become a ranking factor. Regardless of whether or not you are witnessing Caffeine in action yet, rest assured that it will be here sooner or later, and any edge you can give yourself in the meantime is for the good of your own site’s performance. Speed will not only supposedly help you in search going forward, but it just makes for a better user experience.

Share your thoughts about Google’s Caffeine update.

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Just recently, however, David Harkness posted to that same thread, pointing to official Google documentation for sitemap errors, which says under the "Too many Sitemaps" error:

The list of Sitemaps in your Sitemap index exceeds the maximum allowed. A Sitemap index can contain no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Split your Sitemap index into multiple Sitemap index files and ensure that each contains no more than 50,000 Sitemaps. Then, resubmit your Sitemap index files individually.

The larger number was confirmed by Simon, who came back to the conversation, saying, "Thanks for resurfacing this thread as we’ve improved our capacity a bit since then. The limit used to be 1,000. The Help Center article you point to is correct. The current maximum number of Sitemaps that can be referenced in a Sitemap Index file is 50,000."

As Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, who stumbled across this post points out, "This is a huge increase in capacity…Still, each Sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 URLs, so technically 50,000 multiplied by 50,000 is 2,500,000,000 or 2.5 billion URLs can be submitted to Google via Sitemaps."

In other words, you can have a lot of sitemaps in one sitemap index file. That’s some good information to know, and it is a little surprising that there wasn’t a bigger announcement made about this.
 

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Dana Todd of Newsforce recently sat down with WebProNews to discuss Storyteller marketing’s revival. She has some interesting things to say on the subject:

As noted by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, back in the summer of 2008, covering Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, Gary Stein, Director of Strategy for Ammo Marketing highlighted five stories that can be told:

1. Origin – where did you/your brand come from
2. Purpose – tells us why you are a business
3. Vision – similar to origin but is where are we going
4. Education – Starbucks educated people about traditions of coffee
5. Ethics – when someone walks the walks of what they are doing
6. Connection – reaching out and talking to the customer

In that same session, Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus added that the story should be simple, repeatable, and memorable. She also said that suggested that good places to find your brand’s story are from employees, your customers, and even suppliers.

As our own Abby Johnson points out in the above video, every business has a story. You may know what that story is, but if you look hard enough, you can find it, and you can use it. Chances are people will be able to connect with that story on some level (if it is the right story), and this can be a powerful way to keep your brand in people’s minds.
 

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Dana Todd of Newsforce recently sat down with WebProNews to discuss Storyteller marketing’s revival. She has some interesting things to say on the subject:

As noted by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, back in the summer of 2008, covering Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, Gary Stein, Director of Strategy for Ammo Marketing highlighted five stories that can be told:

1. Origin – where did you/your brand come from
2. Purpose – tells us why you are a business
3. Vision – similar to origin but is where are we going
4. Education – Starbucks educated people about traditions of coffee
5. Ethics – when someone walks the walks of what they are doing
6. Connection – reaching out and talking to the customer

In that same session, Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus added that the story should be simple, repeatable, and memorable. She also said that suggested that good places to find your brand’s story are from employees, your customers, and even suppliers.

As our own Abby Johnson points out in the above video, every business has a story. You may know what that story is, but if you look hard enough, you can find it, and you can use it. Chances are people will be able to connect with that story on some level (if it is the right story), and this can be a powerful way to keep your brand in people’s minds.
 

Related Articles:

> Small Businesses And Social Media

> The Future Of Online PR

> Is Retargeting the Most Under-Utilized Marketing Strategy?

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1. Once Upon a Time There Was a Business That Needed a Marketing Campaign The most powerful marketing campaigns are often the ones that...
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As Matt McGee mentions in a Search Engine Land piece, even a query like "candy" without any geographical indicator will bring up a seven-pack of local results, but a query for "seo" or "web design" or even something as specific as "web design vancouver" will bring up no local listings whatsoever (although the organic results still heavily favor local businesses in location-specific queries).

Needless to say, some SEOs and designers are taking this as something of a slap in the face, justified or not. Search engine optimization and web design are both services after all, and just about every other type of service you can think of will yield local listings in a Google search.

While this phenomenon was originally thought to be a bug, Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick fame points to a Google Maps Help thread where a Googler going by Joel H. tells a different story:

Today, we’re intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn’t display local listings today. We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent. In some cases, we do show local listings, however (as NSNA/php-er noted) [web design in bellingham]. I’m sure some of you feel we should be displaying local results for queries like [Web Design Vancouver]. I understand that concern, but based on our understanding of our users, we feel this is the right decision for now.

I’ll give the usual disclaimer that we’re constantly working on improving the user experience and results will vary over time. So, this could change in the future, but I wanted to be explicit about what we’re doing today.

So if you use the word "in" in your query, you are more likely to get the local results. Some still have a hard time finding the logic in this move.

"I’m all for their interest in balancing for user intent – it’s their business, their product – but I’m missing the logic here," comments Bill Sebald. 

"I find this disturbing," says Scott Clark. "If I have a physical location in a given area, offer a service to customers in that area that is close to their query, then onebox listings should appear as they do for other creative-class industries."

Not all SEOs have such a problem with what Google is doing though. "I want to be found by people everywhere, not just in the small city I happen to live in at the moment," a content writer comments.

"But you would think that if people typed in a city name or other location, they are actually looking for local results and the maps could be useful," they add. "Although if you have optimized your website for your location, you should get found anyway. And I do all my work online, people don’t need to visit me or even know where I am located so in that sense the maps aren’t always useful or necessary."

People are saying that in some countries, they are still seeing local results for the type of query in question. It is possible that Google has just not rolled out the changes everywhere yet. The quoted content writer suggests that Google just doesn’t know the user-intent of all of its countries’ people as well as it does for the countries where the changes exist.

What do you make of Google showing less local results for SEOs and web designers? Will it hurt local businesses? Share your thoughts.

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"For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to [have] duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects," says John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst with Google Zürich.

Do you have legitimate reasons for having duplicate content? Tell us about them.

"There are situations where it’s not easily possible to set up redirects," he says. "This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel=’canonical’ link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel=’canonical’ link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible."

Mueller gives the following ways of handling cross-domain content duplication: 

- Choose your preferred domain
- Reduce in-site duplication
- Enable crawling and use 301 (permanent) redirects where possible
- Use the cross-domain rel="canonical" link element

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable gives three reasons why the addition of cross-domain support for the rel="canonical" link element is really important:

1. Some hosts don’t allow webmasters to deploy 301 redirects
2. Some site owners aren’t technical enough to implement a 301 redirect
3. In some cases, webmasters do not want to redirect users but rather only search engines (i.e. pagination, weird filtering, tracking parameters added to URLs, etc).

To use the link element, pages don’t have to be identical, but they should be similar. According to Google, slight differences are fine. You should not point point rel="canonical" to the home page of the preferred site. Google says this can result in problems, and that a mapping from an old URL to a new URL for each URL on the old site is the best way to go.

You should not use a nonindex robots meta tag on pages with a rel="canonical" link element because those pages would not be equivalent with regards to indexing, Google says. One would be allowed while the other would be blocked. Google also says it’s important that these pages aren’t disallowed from crawling through a robots.txt file, because search engine crawlers won’t be able to discover the rel="canonical" link element.

Will you find cross-domain support of the rel=”canonical” link element useful? Comment here.

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If it is showing up for you, it is located between Groups and Knol on Google’s "More Google Products" page:

According to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, Google Guru is a product that was launched in Russia back in 2007. While here in the U.S., the link pointing to Google Guru goes nowhere, the Russian link Schwartz provides goes to something that looks like this:

It’s basically a question and answers site. "What is interesting is that Google closed down their Google Answers site back in November 2006, yes over three years ago," says Schwartz. "Is Google Guru their way of getting back into the social Q&A space? Yahoo is dominate right now with Yahoo Answers, maybe Google feels they can make a run at that as well?"

Apparently not everyone is seeing the link to Google Guru at this point, and Google hasn’t at this time made any announcements about it that we are aware of. I expect that will change soon enough. Are you seeing the link?

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Can you "rank" in Google if everyone has different results? Share your thoughts on this.

What Does This Mean for SEO? 

Naturally, when Google announces any significant changes to the way users get their search results, the search engine optimization community must take notice, and must consider what said changes mean for them. If people start getting more results that are specifically tailored to their own tastes, it could be harder for businsses to reach those people through traditional SEO tactics. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is this: Google always makes changes, but there are always ways to adapt.

"Honestly, if this makes Google more relevant for their searchers – all power to them," says Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick, which offers SEO services. "I am not going to say I know what is better for the average searcher. They can quickly figure this out after days and decide to keep it, turn it down, or off completely. SEOs will adapt, like they always do – we are a strong and smart bunch – I am not worried."

My guess is that all of the same best practices for search engine optimization will apply. What you may have to pay greater focus to is your target audience.

Are you worried? Do you think this is a change that could have a negative impact on your search engine traffic? Tell us what you think.

On the other hand, personalized search could play to the strengths of the horizontal content approach. Rich Ord, CEO of iEntry Network and Publisher of WebProNews has an interesting take on the matter. "There is going to be the same number of searches and the same number of clicks to content," he says. "So basically, personalization in search will just be dividing up the traffic pie more."

"This could make people think more about the long tail instead of just focusing on their top key words that they would like to rank for," he adds. "It could also make people less reliant on organic search results for their traffic and in turn increase their use of Adwords."

Could personalized search directly contribute to an increase in revenue for Google itself? Interesting.

The feature has been available to Google users who have accounts, are signed in, and have their web history enabled (on Google) for a while. Now it appears to just be the standard way of delivering search results to everybody.

"This addition enables us to customize search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser," Google says. "It’s completely separate from your Google Account and Web History (which are only available to signed-in users). You’ll know when we customize results because a ‘View customizations’ link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how we’ve customized your results and also let you turn off this type of customization."

If you’re worried about privacy, settle down, because Google lets you turn personalized search off altogether. For signed-in users, all you have to do is remove web history from your Google account. For signed out users, click "web history" in the top right corner of a search results page, then click "disable customizations." You can also just clear your browser’s cookies.

As a user, do you like the idea of Google personalizing your search results? Discuss here.

On a related note, Google is also rolling out the inclusion of real-time search results on regular search results pages for some queries. These results draw from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and numerous other sources. This means you have yet another opportunity for visibility, but it also presents a new challenge, as with any other universal search element, it may push organic listings down on the page.  Are you glad to finally see some real-time search make its way to Google?
 
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Google Suggest has some problems though. This is nothing new. People have discovered some strange suggestions from time to time. One that has been discussed around the web frequently this year for example, is Google’s suggestion of "Why wont my parakeet eat my diarrhea" when a user begins a query with "why won’t". This one has even repeatedly made it onto the Google Hot Trends list.

That one was kind of funny (if that’s your sense of humor), but Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable is pointing to a more disturbing set of suggestions from the search engine. When a user begins a query with "little kids," the very first suggestion is "little kids having sexs". Among the other suggestions on the list are "little kids dancing nasty," and "little kids grinding."

Schwartz  also pointed to another suggestion from Google saying "I am Extremely Terrified of Chinese People" that a user is presented with when beginning a query with "I am".

Schwartz notes that Google’s suggestions are purely algorithmic. It’s not as though Google’s staff is actually encouraging searches like these, but the suggestions do highlight the need for some adjustments and/or human intervention.

In the case of the "little kids" suggestions, Schwartz says a Google employee responded to his report by saying, "Thanks for reporting this to me — I’ll take a look." However, at the time of this writing, each of the aforementioned suggestions are still in place.

Have you seen other inappropriate or otherwise odd suggestions from Google Suggest? Share in the comments.
 

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Update: Out at PubCon in Las Vegas, Mike McDonald of WebProNews discussed the rolling out of the Caffeine update further with popular search enthusiast Barry Schwartz:

Original Article: It appears that the effects of Google’s Caffeine update may be felt sooner rather than later. That is if you really do feel the effects at all.

What are your thoughts on Google’s Caffeine update? Discuss here.

If you are unfamiliar with Caffeine, it is an algorithm update that Google announced in the summer. Upon the announcement, Google’s Matt Cutts said, "The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there.  Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all.  This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure." Cutts told WebProNews about Caffeine in the following interview:

When Caffeine was introduced, so was a sandbox, where people could play around with Caffeine based search results, and get a look at how rankings were altered (if at all), and try to get a feel for how it was going to go. Now that sandbox has closed up shop, it looks like the Caffeine update will be live in Google search before too long. It will start after the holidays at least though.

"I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays," says Cutts on his blog. "Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays."

The announcement at what used to be the Caffeine sandbox reads:

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.

Of course as people tested Caffeine via the sandbox, many of them blogged about their results and findings. The general consensus seemed to be that Caffeine is fast and utilizes real-time search a great deal. Given Google’s frequent announcements related to speed, and a recently announced deal with Twitter, speed and real-time search seem like logical updates to Google search results.

When SEOBook’s Aaron Wall tested Caffeine, he said he thought there was:

- an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text

- perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names

- perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms

- tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results

This stuff should not necessarily be taken as gospel. These are just the results and speculations of individuals from tests of a product that was only introduced (for testing purposes), let alone finalized. It is what it is.

As the Caffeine update rolls out, there will no doubt be more and more mystery unraveled as search industry professionals scramble to stay ahead of the game, and Google drops subtle hints from time to time. It’s going to be interesting to see where Caffeine takes the world’s most popular search engine.

Have you tested Caffeine? What do you think about the update? Share your findings here.

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