Google Caffeine and Site Speed

Referring to my last posting about Google Caffeine ~ New from Google. I've got a news from WebProNews.com, the reporter had interviewed and discussed with Matt Cuttls ~ Software Engineer Google Inc, about two key ingredients. The first ingredients is about Algorithm update (Caffeine) which was recently found to begin rolling out soon.

The fact of the matter, as Matt himself says, is that it is only going live at one of Google’s data centers, and it is not even live yet, but will be before the holidays. That said, Caffeine will not roll out to the rest of Google’s data centers until after the holidays. He says that while Google could have rolled the update out faster, they didn’t want to upset webmasters by releasing it before the holidays. This is something that happened in the past when Google released its infamous Florida update before the holidays, causing rankings to drastically change. Cutts says not to panic.

Cutts also says that there might be an address set up soon where people can go and search, maybe not exclusively with Caffeine 100% of the time, but where queries will be more likely to hit the data center that’s hosting it.

The second things that Matt discussed is that of site speed. From the sound of it, speed is going to be a huge factor in SEO moving in to 2010. He says that a number of people within Google consider speed to be very important to the web, and they are considering if that should play a role in the rankings of websites in search results.

According to Cutts, speed hasn’t played a role in rankings in the past, but that may very well change. Watch the video for more details about Caffeine and Google’s resources for helping webmasters improve site speed.

See the video about this:

More WebProNews Videos

Consider if Page Speed is to Become a Ranking Factor
Bill Hartzer recently shared a few tips on the subject in an interview with WebProNews, you can see the video here.

Google also has its own tips. The company offered a few on site performance improvement using its Webmaster Tools. Webmaster Tools has a Site Performance feature, which shows you a performance overview graph. This looks at the aggregated speed numbers for your site, based on the pages that were most frequently accessed by visitors who use the Google Toolbar and have the PageRank feature activated.

Google recommends that you watch the load times over a short period of time to see what's stable, because you may see spikes here and there. If you consistently see high load times, that is probably representative of what most people see.

There is also a section that gives you Page Speed Suggestions. It gives you some example pages from your site and suggestions on how to optimize those specific pages. The suggestions are based on Google's Page Speed Firefox/Firebug plug-in.

Google give more information on each of these features here.

Sites aren't the only things Google places emphasis on speed with.  Last week, Google launched a new extension for Chrome, which lets developers identify performance problems with their web apps too. The tool is called Speed Tracer, and it uses a "sluggishness graph" combined with other metrics to help users pinpoint the problems that are slowing their web apps down.

Are you ready for this methods about new algorithm upadate rangking to your site? Hopefully this post can provide some knowledge about Google Caffeine. If there are suggestions and comments we can share here.

Source:
~ www.webpronews.com - by Chris Crum
~ googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

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