On June 8, 2010, Google officially completed development of its new “Caffeine” indexing algorithm.  Many marketers were left wondering, “How does this impact me?”  Well, I’ve done a fair bit of research and here’s what I’ve come up with…

• 50% fresher results – Google actually says “Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered.”  So that sounds like they’re now indexing more pages than ever, which means more competition.   Not good!
• Less chance of dominating Page 1 – Now, more than ever, Site Authority plays an important part in rankings.  So if you previously had your main site, plus a Squidoo lens, plus a bunch of articles showing up on Page 1, there’s a good chance you’ll no longer have such a smattering of listings.  Chances are that some of the big players like Amazon, About, Wikipedia, etc have taken over your spots.

So what methods should a marketer use in this “new world” so that Caffeine has more love for you?

• Use old domains (obviously this is easier said than done…but if you have the chance take it…)
• Backlink inner pages too (not only the home page) – Google now sees each page as its own entity moreso than before.  So just because your home page has a ton of backlinks no longer means that link juice will automatically flow through to your inner pages.
• Regularly add fresh content (which is preferably unique).

My thoughts

I’ve noticed many, shitty, 1-page, “Made For Adsense” sites drop in rankings after the latest Caffeine updates.  My take on this?  Great!

It’s embarrassing to be an internet marketer when it seems like the vast majority of our kind serves no purpose other than to flood the interwebs with useless spam.  So if Caffeine means the public will see less of this crap and more useful search results, then I’m all for it.

A friend of mine was recently wondering, “What’s the difference between being ranked #1 and #2 on Google?”

He guessed that it wouldn’t be very much, maybe like 10% max.

Well, surprisingly it’s much higher than that!

While I haven’t seen any data from Google for the click-through rate averages for each position, there’s data floating around from AOL that could easily be applied to any search engine.

• Ranking #1 gets 42.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #2 gets 11.9 % of clicks
• Ranking #3 gets 8.5 % of clicks
• Ranking #4 gets 6.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #5 gets 4.9 % of clicks
• Ranking #6 gets 4.1 % of clicks
• Ranking #7 gets 3.4 % of clicks
• Ranking #8 gets 3.0 % of clicks
• Ranking #9 gets 2.8 % of clicks
• Ranking #10 gets 3.0 % of clicks

This means that if a keyword gets 100 searches a month, the #1 result will get 42 clicks whereas the #2 result will only get 12!   Pretty big difference.

Great example of why it’s so important to be ranked #1

Even better, if you’re #1 for organic search results, Google Maps listings, AND AdWords, you can completely dominate the competition.

So, just when you thought you were already overwhelmed with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, along comes yet another social networking/sharing service.

Google Buzz has joined the party.

There’s already lots of rants floating around about why it’s awesome or why it’s great, but I’m going to talk specifically about what should be improved with it.  To be perfectly honest though, I do like the idea of having a social networking tool integrated into Gmail, since I already use it for all my email as well as chat.  Plus, the Gmail search feature is wicked-cool and will undoubtedly be useful with Buzz.

Confusing Privacy Features

Most people want to be able to manually approve each follower, rather than having them auto-follow.  However, they don’t realize that Google Buzz is integrated with your public Google Profile.  So this means whatever you post in Buzz as “public” can be viewed by ANYONE on the internet via your Google Profile page.  Therefore it doesn’t matter if people have chosen to follow you or not.  If you are concerned about the privacy of a post, simply choose “Private” and optionally post to a “group” of Gmail contacts.

No Way To Tell Which Post is New

It’s nice that there’s an indication near the Buzz logo in your Gmail menu of how many new Buzz posts there are, however once you get into Buzz there’s no way to know which posts are the new ones.  So you’re stuck reading through a lot of what you’ve already read.  Definitely a time-waster.

No Tags / Keywords / Categories

These would be very handy to help search and organize our Buzz’s.

Can’t Include an Image in a Comment

When you create your own post there’s a useful link to insert a photo from your computer.  However, this isn’t possible when commenting on your friend’s posts.  There’s been a few times I wanted to include a pic in my comment but wasn’t able to.

Re-Buzz?

Similar to a Twitter Re-Tweet, it would be cool to be able to send a Buzz from one of your contacts along to your other contacts.

That’s about it for now.  Does anyone have other ideas?

Note: This post is related to my ongoing experiment to determine which Google prefers more – Fresh Content or Quality Backlinks

Ok just an update -

About 2 days after I tried to get both sites indexed by Google (used StumbleUpon, submitted sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools, posted a couple backlinks on high PR sites)…site “b” was but site “a” still wasn’t.

Now here we are a few weeks later and site “a” is indexed but site “b” isn’t. So it seems as if Google knows that they are similar in structure and content (although I tried my best to rewrite the content using synonyms and what-not so it was unique) and randomly decides to switch which one is indexed? Does anyone else find that frickin’ weird!

My assumption is that this is happening because they’re both subdomains of the same domain, so perhaps my experiment was flawed before I ever started. Maybe I should have purchased two unique domains instead of cheaping out?

Here’s the two queries to see which pages from each site are indexed:

• Site A index query
• Site B index query

I recently figured out a neat trick for getting a YouTube video to show up on Page 1 of Google search results.  We all know that YouTube = Google, so that makes this technique even more powerful than if it was done with some random video site that may be shut down or Google may someday decide to ignore.

Disclaimer:

This trick used to work great before the YouTube blog was changed to a Blogger platform.  Now there’s a “NOFOLLOW” attribute on the comment hyperlinks, so it’s arguable how effective this is anymore.  But if you want to try it…give ‘er!   Report back if it seems to work.

Here’s what ya gotta do:

1. Create a YouTube profile, if you haven’t already.
2. Upload a video that’s been keyword-optimized for the Google search phrase you’re targeting.  This means the title of the video should be your long-tail keyword.  Like “make money online fast”.
3. Create a Blogger profile (Frank’s is just an example), if you haven’t already.  Add a backlink in the “About Me” section which goes to your YouTube profile URL.  Again, use the keyword you’re targetting.
4. Visit the YouTube Blog.
5. Find a story to comment on.
6. For the “Comment As” field select “Google Account”.
7. Write  a respectful, relevant comment.
8. You should be prompted to log into your Blogger account when you click “Preview” or “Post Comment”
9. Notice a few things,
   • The Blog page has PR of 9…that’s HUGE!
10. Wait for your video to appear in Google search results.
11. ?
12. ?
13. Profit

Done and done.