Internet Business Consulting Services Corporation
Web Marketing
Google Caffeine : Google’s New Search Engine Indexing System
Jun 15th
Google is now announcing there new indexing system called Caffeine. Google says Google Caffeine search engine indexing system is much faster than there older system. One advantage is that news stories, blog posts and forum posts are indexed better and faster allowing users to find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible before.
Google Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than there last indexing system. According to Google this is the largest collection of web content Google has ever offered.
Why did Google create a new indexing system instead of using the current index ?
Content on the web is continually expanding. This content might be text, images, videos, news and some real time updates. Also present web pages are richer and more complex. From the Searches perspective it is also important to provide users with the latest relevant content . Publishers need content to quickly appear on the search engines shortly after their posts in search results. To meet these expectations Google implement his new search indexing system.
The image below explaining how different between old indexing system and the new caffeine.
Before comparing old index and caffeine , lets look how search engines crawl the entire web and store the data found there. When you search Google , your not searching the live web, your searching your query through the Google database or index or register like we do in a library. If we want to find specific book , first we go to librarian or searching the index of the library. After the librarian finds the specific place for that book we go to that rack to get the book. This index system just like a card catalog in a library helps you to find that specific content. Google does the same for you. Google has an index of the web , it shows the path to find relevant data for your search query,
Google’s old indexing system had several layers, and some layers refreshed in faster rate than others. The main layer update every couple of weeks. Couple of weeks means there is some kind of significant delay from the published date. News for example thought it is highly relevant shortly after it happens, tends to become history rather than news in a very short time. We live in a world of instant gratification and get news immediately on our cell phones or computers – a week delay isn’t really acceptable.
In Caffeine, Google analyzes the web in small portions and update there search index rapidly and continuously and also globally. If the “bot” finds some new information on existing pages it is directly added to there index. So for both searchers and for publishers, if you need fresher information ,here you have it. Publishers also can also publish there hot information and get it prioritized for indexing making it appear in searches much faster.
According to Google in every second caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. So the new indexing system is much busier than the old one getting content indexed and available faster.
Google – “We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind”. And there idea is to build a faster and more comprehensive search engine that delivers more and more relevant results. Google engineers are still working on this great system, there will be some more improvements in coming months. We have to wait to see what those are.
Website Speed – Why you need this
Apr 20th
Speeding up website is naturally important.
Why ?
Well the natural understood reason is that internet users expect immediate results. If a page takes too long to respond to a request, the user will likely go elsewhere.
Until know, this has been ignored by search engine ranking accept of course when it was so slow the crawler moved on. But now Google will help these users by including speed of a page when determining page results. This means additional signal “page speed” will now not only effect user experience but also affect the ability of the users to find your site on google in the first place.
Google considers over 200 signals when determine search rankings. That’s right over 200. That is why SEO work can be so complicated. There is new signal partner announced by google. “Site Speed”. Site Speed is basically site loading time. Maybe 90% of your page is fast but one item on that page takes a long time. Well that could hurt your search results.
If you are web master or blog owner you can test your site loading time in glance. There are loads of tools to check up on this signal.
1 . Page Speed – Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement
2 . YSlow, – A free tool from yahoo to suggest site speed
3 . WebPagetest – shows load performance and optimization checklist.
4 . Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance – if you are using google webmasters tools you have in built site speed checker in there.
In addition to having a faster sites that improves user experience and ranking, faster sites also reduce operational cost. According to google this new signal will not effect not more than 1% of search queries. But in future it will be a definite signal when ranking sites.
Now it’s time to look at and good idea to increase your web site speed, and certainly if your building a new site or doing ongoing development, it is something you need to consider. Smaller sites have an advantage when it comes to site speed. If you have big site with loads of images and videos, it is time to correct and optimize those pages to help with your Google SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page).
Performance is important to us. If it is important to you and you would like us to evaluate your pages please contact us. We can do a free evaluation and make recommendations to improve the performance of your site.
WordPress MU how to redirect non-www to www
Nov 17th
You installed WordPress MU on Apache and wrote few blog posts. Now when you go to your site by typing the www version of url (ex: www.yourblog.com) the url automatically get changed to non www version? But you want to get the www version instead?
Ok. This is what you have to do
1) Login to WordPress Mu admin
2) On left side menu “Site Admin” -> “Blogs” and click on your blog
3) Change site url from http://yourblog.com to http://www.yourblog.com
4) Scroll down and press “Update options”
Now all non-www requests will be redirect to www version.
(The procedure is similar in regular WordPress where you need to change the “Blog Address URL” in admin -> Settings -> General)
Of course to work this you need to have apache mod_rewrite installed and activated on your server.
Keeping only one url version is search engine friendly. Say you allow your site to be accessed by all these urls. www.yourblog.com, yourblog.com and yourblog.com/index.php. All these point to a same page. This can be lead to pagerank splits, Backlinks split and lastly you’re risking getting filtered for duplicate content by the new filters at Google.
For these reasons it is better you keep either www or non-www version activated but not both.
Determine the best way to automate Sitemaps
Nov 16th
In simple terms, a sitemap (or site map) is a list of all the pages in your website. Sitemaps provide two benefits: easier navigation (for visitors of your site) and better visibility by search engines.
With the rise of modern SEO techniques the importance of the sitemap has been growing. Sitemaps are the best way to inform search engines about changes on your website.
As a development company, we always apply current SEO techniques on our customer’s websites to ensure that they get top ranking on search engines. Not only on Google, but Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com etc. as well.
Including sitemaps is one of the important tasks we perform when developing sites for our clients. And this is done either manually or dynamically according to the customer needs.
Typically a good site with lots of content changes regularly. In this case it is expensive and tedious to continually update the site map. For this reason, we feel that in some cases it is important to be able to auto generate a sitemap.
We evaluated some sitemap auto generating tools and following are some of the solutions we like:
- Google XML Sitemaps [ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ ]
- It is a plugin for WordPress sites, which automatically updates the sitemap and notifies all major search engines every time you create a new post/content.
- Addme.com [ http://www.addme.com/ror-sitemap-generator.htm ].
- An online tool dedicated for sites developed using Ruby on Rails (ROR)
- Google Site Map Generator [ http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/sitemap/ ]
- Another simple online tool to generate site maps.
- PHPClasses.org [ http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2612.html ]
- A class library which can be integrated with PHP sites.
It is obvious that selecting a sitemap generating mechanism is depending on several facts such as the nature of the site, sever side technology used etc. So making the correct decision is up to your experience in SEO and web development team.
Contact us if you would like help generating a sitemap for your site, have general web marketing, seo, or web design questions…
RDFa vs microformats for Google Rich Snippets
Nov 16th
We are in the process of implementing Google Rich Snippets into a customers web site. Specifically to provide ratings to travel vendors and travel destinations, which will appear in search results on Google as google snippets. These will be delivered in Cake PHP. Also we are considering using it for some product ratings for e-commerce sites delivered in Ruby on Rails. We may even consider adding it to WordPress sites as a way of rating the content described on the page.
Of course the immediate concern was which technology to use microformats or RDFa? Not that it should be a big concern but we have to support whichever technology we implement.
Searching microformats vs RDFa on, brought up a ton of articles, and in depth debates on the subject.
Understandably so, since microformats appear to be more adopted, and the other is developed by W3C.
I think Googles approach is a good one, they support both of them so we can use whichever standard we prefer.
As a development company we inherit a lot of work started by other development companies, so we will also support both. If we are creating or adding them from scratch to a site however, we will choose RDFa.
Initially I thought the opposite because microformats seemed more intuitive and easier to implement. After more research however, it seemed that RDFa would win out in the long run, and be more flexible. No one can know for sure though and I guess the best solution for everyone would be for them to just merge as a standard.
For more detail on the subject Evan Prodomou has a good write up RDFa_vs_microformats
How many links are there to my site
Nov 13th
Unfortunately the tools used to do this don’t always work perfectly, but a few simple ways to check the links to your site are:
Checking your links on Google:
link: yourdomainname
example:
link: ibcscorp.com on google
Checking your links on Yahoo: (same way)
link: your domain name
example:
link:ibcscorp.com on yahoo
This is very trivial perhaps, but on Yahoo, if your site hasn’t been crawled or indexed or has no results, then you will get an error message. This will in turn give you the opportunity to submit your site for free to Yahoo. You have to have a Yahoo ID to do this it is kind of a pain.
This will then put you in the cue to be crawled by Yahoo. I am sure if you wait long enough it will happen anyway, but if your site is new this will help speed things up. Even still they say to expect a delay of several weeks before your URL is crawled, unless you pay them 299 in which case they will do it in 7 days.
Checking your links on Bing.com (was MSN.com) is again the same thing.
link: your domain
example: link:ibcscorp.com on bing
Like Yahoo, if the page isn’t found, it can be entered at this point, again it may take some time for it to be indexed.
Determining where you are at for web marketing
Nov 13th
Before you start any program or set a goal; it doesn’t matter if it is an exercise program, weight loss program, or marketing program; you have to take baseline measurement of where you are.
You also have to take measurements along the way in order to determine if what you are doing is working or not.
Over the next several posts I will be reviewing tools which help determine your effectiveness on the web, and then how to put together a program to improve that.
Web Marketing!
Nov 9th
Ibcscorp.com cares about the success of its customers. We provide web marketing consulting and services to help maximize the benefity that our clients can get from the Internet. Some of our leading consultants have been using the Internet since as early as 1992, and have created and worked in many successful on line businesses.
Our goal is to work with our clients to help them determine an appropriate marketing budget for web marketing and then to maximize the effectiveness of that budget. We can’t do it all for you, but we can do it with you to help improve your success.