Google’s new- and faster- updating system: Caffeine

Last Tuesday, June 8th, Google announced the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. With Caffeine, Google analyze the web in small portions and update their search index on a continuous basis, globally. As Google find new pages, or new information on existing pages, they can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published.

According to Google,

“Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this 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.”

Read the entire article here.

SEO tool #481: Article submission

Last month we submitted an article for Dr Bert Wilmer titled, “Teeth Whitening For a Picture Perfect Smile.”  This is an integral part of the SEO process for our clients.  Today we ran our weekly search engine ranking reports and this is what we found:

Dr Wilmer’s website ranks #1 in Google for the keywords “Dentists Denver NC” and “Dentist Denver NC”.  He’s at the #2 spot with “Denver NC Dentist.”  Things are looking good.

It’s Official: Google Now Counts Site Speed As A Ranking Factor

Beware dentists who overload pages with too many pictures, over-sized pictures, flash and tons of javascript.  Google has kept it’s promise: Site speed is now a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, and is already in place for U.S. searchers.

How does Google measure page speed?  According to this article, the 2 primary factors are:

1. How a page responds to Googlebot
2. Load time as measured by the Google Toolbar

I recommend the rule: say enough to get your point across.  When sites include dozens of before/after pictures, it slows down the page load speed.  Keep it simple.