Architect Web Design

What’s Google Caffeine and what does it mean for SEO?

On Monday 10th August the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog was updated with details of the new Google Caffeine update that Google plans to implement soon. Google are describing this update as ‘under the hood‘ meaning this update should not affect rankings dramatically.

The purpose of the update is to make the coding behind Google search more effective to make searches more accurate, faster and more scalable. Here is the quote from the Google Caffeine Blog Post:

It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions

What’s interesting about this is that this update (no details on when this update will be applied to normal Google search) is the first one in a series of updates. It’s clear Google has been working on this for some months and it is not a reaction to the launch of Bing. Over the next couple of months it will be interesting to see what Google has in store to keep itself as the number 1 search engine in the world.

In the meantime you can test out the new Caffeine update by going to http://www2.sandbox.google.com to test the Caffeine update using the Google.com index. Experimenting with this should give you an idea of what to expect from the update. Google are requesting that if you have any feedback on the update to go to the ‘Dissatisfied? Help us improve‘ link at the bottom of the page and use the word Caffeine in the subject field.

wayne Google Google, search engines, seo

Report stolen content to Google

I recently discovered a website that had stolen the content from the website project I am working on. I found the duplicate content culprits using Google, I took this to mean Google had indexed their page and was not indexing mine due to the search engine seeing my content as being the duplicate.

This has been a real problem for me in my current role as Google Webmaster Tools is telling me that Google has indexed 2/116 URLs of the website. This is a big problem concerning SEO’s – I need to find out why Google isn’t indexing the pages and what to do about the stolen content.

After studying the website that copied the content, and the process needed to go through with Google in order to remove their page from the index I decided not to go through Google. It seemed to me that the process is a bit drawn out and involves correspondence with not only Google but the site containing the stolen content.

Here is the process to report stolen content to Google

Basically there is a copyright act for the internet called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This act protects content owners publishing content on the web – providing they publish the content first. You have to write to Google in the US declaring stolen content, then the website that stole your content, and somewhere along the line hopefully the matter is resolved.

I do not have the luxury of time, as of course we all know – time is money! So I decided not to contact Google in the US, as I am in the UK and the offending website is in Nigeria. I instead decided to re-write the pages they have copied. This new content should draw the search engines back to the website and have them index the pages.

Looks like the under-handed criminals have won this battle – but with my much more SEO text and less spelling mistakes in the new content, they will not win the war!

wayne Google domain, duplicate content, Google, index, internet marketing, search engines, seo, URL