UPDATED: On February 25, 2010 Matt McGee cited an unnamed Google source as saying that Caffeine is not yet live on more than one data center. You can read the article here. Given that stipulation, what I’m seeing in Google Websearch is impressive, considering that Caffeine has supposedly not yet rolled out.
I have believed for a couple of weeks now that I am really seeing Caffeine in Google’s search results. That’s a hard statement to support since despite all the false reports circulating in the various SEO forums Caffeine is not a ranking algorithm update.
Today I finally received what I believe is confirmation that Caffeine is powering Google’s index (at least on whatever data centers I am being directed to).
As many of you know, I’m a huge science fiction and fantasy fan. I launched Xenite.Org in 1997 and through the years have had opportunities to work with film and television studios, interview actors and writers, and just collate a lot of great discussion forums, fan fiction, and interesting articles.
And we’re also well known for loving cheese dip.
If you watch fantasy television you’re probably familiar with Legend of the Seeker, starring Craig Horner as Richard Cypher (now Rahl). In mid-December I was invited by his publicist to interview Craig. Every year he gives 2 or 3 rounds of interviews to the media — all the celebrities do to keep interest in their shows going — but I think this was his first fan site interview.
It’s a big deal in the online fan community when a fan site is allowed access to a celebrity from a popular show. It shows that a studio or actor wants to reach out to the fan base and engage with them. Of course, Craig’s co-star Bridget Regan has an active Twitter account (fans were able to directly wish her a happy birthday this week). It’s not like the show’s cast and crew have been working behind a moat and wall — there has been engagement.
But I was given the opportunity to chat with Craig for about 45 minutes and ask him whatever questions I chose. That’s every fan’s wish when you get down to it. Sure, we read the canned interviews the news media turn out but they often ask the same questions: “Tell us about your show?” “What’s your background?” “What do you think of New Zealand?” etc.
In my mind, this interview was an opportunity to break out of that mode and give Craig a chance to talk about some other stuff. That’s just the way I think, Contrarian that I am. I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing when I can create some unique and (hopefully) interesting content (many of you call this “linkbait”).
So let’s fast-forward to actually publishing the article (http://www.xenite.org/tv/legend-of-the-seeker/craig-horner-interview.html), which I put online last night (this was, after all, a personal time project).
I launched a few Tweets at fan Twitter accounts I knew about and blogged about the article on a couple of SF-Fandom blogs (SF-Fandom is Xenite’s sister site, where we host our forum communities). And I announced the interview all over the Xenite network.
This morning when I checked Google’s search results for any sign of feedback to the interview I found several fan sites had already picked up the article and their posts or articles were already indexed. What’s more, a number of social media sites were also included in the results.
This is, to me, a clear sign of faster crawling and indexing by Google. In fact, even though Xenite is not published through a CMS (and therefore does not publish a comprehensive RSS feed and does NOT ping), the Craig Horner interview was indexed and available in the search results within minutes.
Sure, Xenite is a link-rich domain that’s been around since 1997 and etc. but it used to take 2-3 days for a new section to show up in Google’s search results. I decided to create a dedicated Legend of the Seeker section to be home to the interview and I pushed out the core site a few days ago. It was also indexed within minutes, and unlike the interview I had not put out any advance warning for the fans that Xenite was creating a fan section.
On January 25 Google Reader announced that you can now follow changes on any Website and I don’t think they were exaggerating. I don’t use Google Reader (or any other feedreader, except when I’m analyzing technical issues) so I didn’t seed their service with any URLs or status requests.
Caffeine seems to be more than just a vague factor in the search visibility we experience today. Does it affect your rankings? Well, I would say it speeds up the ranking process. The sooner all those sites get into the index, the sooner all their links can start working — as well as your on-page optimization.
I don’t normally try to compete with news and entertainment sites for keywords — there are too many of them. But this morning Xenite appears on the first page for the relatively uncompetitive term “an interview with Craig Horner”. I don’t think anyone is optimizing for that expression but I’m nonetheless appearing alongside sites like YouTube, Chud, UGO, Chicago Now, The TV Addict, etc. That’s not exactly humble company on the Web.
Will the ranking stick or improve? Who knows? I don’t have time to build a query space around “an interview with Craig Horner”. This interview is significant because of its length, the quality of the information I was able to provide, and its relative uniqueness but in the entertainment biz today’s star is yesterday’s memory. I mean, literally, come Monday this interview will be old news.
Craig has been doing interviews over the past few weeks. Most of those interviews (if not all) have benefitted from being published through Google News-compliant XML feeds. Xenite.Org is not positioned in Google News. Xenite.Org is not a blog. It’s just a Website, hand-coded (still), pieced together over 13 years.
Caffeine makes it look like Xenite has more oomph than it ever had. I won’t say that is going to happen for every Website, but I think this is the first real public indication that Caffeine is doing what Google promised it would do.
And I must say, I like what I’m seeing. I hope I see more of this, not only for my own sites and our client sites, but for all good Websites out there.
And just so it’s clear to everyone, this was NOT an SEO experiment. I did not try to set up any controlled conditions, etc. Xenite.Org is a real live site and so are all the sites that picked up the story and either linked to or simply mentioned Xenite. I’m just documenting an observable phenomenon in a very public way.
Those are the only cards I have in my hand at this time, and they are on the table.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Jonathan Becker 02.07.10 at 5:05 pm
Michael,
A question for you. You mention that “despite all the false reports circulating in the various SEO forums Caffeine is not a ranking algorithm update.”. Google seems to have put a higher emphasis on user generated results (like tweets) in SERP features like real-time search. Does your comment above mean that instead of tweets showing more in SERPs due to algorithmic weight/ranking changes, they are simply the result of Caffeine’s ability to better index things like tweets?
@jzbecker
Michael Martinez 02.08.10 at 9:07 am
I think the scrolling Tweets are simply an injection of real-time results, just as many videos, images, and news stories are injected into normal Web search results.
Caffeine just seems to make it all happen faster. But it may also increase the importance of heavy linking, which I have deemed the bane of SEO for years. Think about it. The older, well-linked sites will be updated quickly by Google regardless of whether they have RSS/XML feeds for the search engines to monitor. But newer, link-poor sites may struggle to get their updates indexed because they don’t have as many links pointing them.
In order to negate the artificial need for more links, Google would have to implement a new crawling scheduler that doesn’t rely so much on how many links a site has pointing to it.
If we assume for the sake of discussion that all Google does is toss newly “discovered” links into a queue, then the more heavily linked any site is the more often its own pages will be tossed into the queue. And the more internal links a site has, the more often it will be able to queue its own content.
Of course, that is the underlying premise of much of my advice through the years, though I have always assumed it wasn’t that simple. It’s just that it seemed to work that way.
Now, is Google going to run through its queue faster? Or is it going to manage the queue in a different way so as to be more fair to smaller, newer sites that don’t have much of a link profile?
They could probably help reduce the link spam problem if they answer that question directly in a very public way.
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