Google’s “Caffeine” Indexing Update Completed
Tuesday, Google announced the new indexing system Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50% faster, fresher results than their previous indexing system. In the past, the old index would refresh at a fast rate of every couple of weeks resulting in late information for Google searchers. Google’s spiders previously crawled the entire web causing considerable delays as to when Google found the page and when it made the page available to searchers. Caffeine allows Google’s spiders to analyze the web in smaller segments and update the search index on a constant basis. Caffeine is the perfect name for Google’s new indexing system based on the speed of the processing, which is greatly improved because the spiders now index hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel; if the pages indexed were measured in piles of paper, it would elevate at a rate of three miles every second.
AdWords’ Competitive Landscape Tool
Looking to compare yourself to your competitors? AdWords has developed an Analyze competition tool in the Opportunities tab. Currently small businesses (using the English language AdWord interface) are able to use this new tool, and in the near future, it will be accessible to more advertisers.
Analyze competition looks at your account over the past two weeks and creates a list of categories that symbolizes the product/service you’re advertising. Categories are formed by Google.com search terms and are coordinated with your ad text, keywords, and landing page text. Once categories are formed, a bar graph will appear for each category showing your company’s performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in matching categories.
Other information you can see about your competitors with the Analyze competition tool are exact size of competitive range, and the mean and median performance levels. Also included is the CTR, impressions, clicks and average position of your competitors.
The Analyze competition tool comes with a level of privacy as all the information displayed hides the advertiser’s identity.
Twitter Announces Its Own URL Shortener
Twitter has announced that all links posted to statuses will automatically go through their own URL shortener; all URL’s posted will be shortened and passed through http://t.co/ as a URL. Twitter feels that by doing this, the overall user experience and safety of links shared across the site will be better.
Many SEOs, however, strongly oppose redirecting URLs through a series of different links. Under this new format, if a status update on Twitter contains a shortened URL to Website A (bit.ly/WebsiteA), when it is posted, the link will automatically be changed to something like http://t.co/07dks.
The major problem with this is that the original shortened link to Website A (bit.ly/WebsiteA) gets lost in translation when it gets redirected through Twitter’s native URL shortener. It is known that the more times a URL is 301 redirected, the more slowly search engines follow the paths and pass through. In addition to this, Matt Cutts recently told SEOMoz that these “chain redirects are a bad idea.”
Dana Redfield
Rocket Clicks Staff
Sources:
The Official Google Blog – Our New Search Index Caffeine
AdWords Blog – AdWords Brings You Insight About the Competitive Landscape
Search Engine Roundtable – Will Twitter’s New URL Shortener Hurt SEOs?
