Google finally launched its Caffeine update. For those unfamiliar with updates in the SEO world: Google traditionally launches a major change every two years, with a name seemingly chosen at some late-night Google engineers’ meeting.  These updates typically strike fear into the hearts of SEO engineers because they might shift the focus of the algorithm, resulting in major losses in rankings for sites that aren’t prepared.  Here’s a basic explanation of what happened with Caffeine:

The first and most important thing to remember is Caffeine is not an algorithm update, so rankings will not be directly affected by this change. Rather, it changes (1) the speed at which Google can crawl and index information to make it available to users in search results and (2) the amount of data Google can store in its index at once.

Prior to Caffeine, the Google crawling process would go as follows:

1. Googlebot crawled a site and pulled all crawled information into the Google index.
2. The newly indexed information was processed through the algorithm to determine the rank of pages for particular keywords.
3. Once this data was processed, the updated index was pushed out to hundreds of data centers in batches — a process that took over three months.

The data center you hit when you enter a search into Google is dependent on where you sit in the world and the load that a data center is currently experiencing. That’s why it’s said that SEO recommendations take up to three months to show results.

With the Caffeine update, Google is able to process indexed information through the algorithm and push it out to all data centers almost instantly.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that pages are being crawled more quickly — just that Google is able to get webpage updates out to all data centers more quickly.

The second focus of Caffeine is on storage capabilities. User-generated content has skyrocketed over the past two years, which became a problem for Google since there was so much more info to crawl and index. The update has increased storage capabilities so Google can index more information. Information can be as basic as a new web page or attribution to a page of credit for incoming links. The attribution model for links hasn’t changed. Google is just able to store more information for a longer time now.

Since this isn’t an algorithm update and there isn’t a ranking benefit, there is nothing in your optimization efforts that needs to change. The benefit to Razorfish clients is that updates will be processed almost instantaneously, so results of optimizations should show more quickly than before. Improved storage capabilities also increases the value of smart optimizations, as it gives Google a better view of interconnections among linked sites.

Last week, Google launched a new results page layout, giving searchers a variety of options to the left of the search results. The changes are primarily to the layout and styling and are intended to provide an even richer search experience for users. While the search options panel has been available since 2009, this is the first time Google included it in the default view for all users.

While the changes seem minor, many feel that the changes go against Google’s simple way of presenting information. Some posts in Google’s forum describe it as “shocking and horrible”. Google has stated that the new layout is still a work in progress.

We polled our team to see if the new layout is useful for searches and the team was pretty split. I guess time will tell…

Update: We encourage you to check out the full Google Latest Results Page POV prepared by Steve Rose and Sam Hailstone, SEO Engineers from the Razorfish UK Office!

Last week, Google released their SEO Report Card, designed to identify opportunities for SEO improvement within Google and to share SEO best practices with the industry.  The report card measures the main pages of 100 Google sites against common optimization categories, assigning a grade for each.

We agree that scoring pages can be a good way to aggregate feedback and flag issues. We asked Razorfish’s SEO team to give Google’s report card a grade, based on its potential usefulness to companies with many websites. Our SEO team was unimpressed — zero As or Bs were handed out. Here’s a sample response, and a chart of all responders’ grades below:

“Google has outlined a basic approach but does not clearly define where emphasis should be placed to maximize value. There are dozens of tactics not addressed in this document that may be affecting their level of organic success.

Though they are self deprecating in their approach to pulling back the curtain, I think they might mislead some people about what is important in SEO. They discuss not having proper keywords in place, but they don’t do a good job specifying how to source keywords or the value of ranking for certain keywords. I mean, regardless of its title tags, the Google Keyword Tool ranks #1 for the top search terms for keyword research. On the one hand, yes, they’re not using some best practices, but on the other, SEO can’t be reduced to a checklist and not all sites are created equal. Some require one or two changes to show improvement while others need the full gamut of techniques.”

We want to hear from you so share your grade with us.

Have an idea for QuickPoll? Email us at razorfishsearch@razorfish.com

Up until this point, the only option for search accessible video has been to use SWFObject or something like it that utilizes javascript to swap in the video content when flash is detected. The video is swapped into a container that by default holds content (HTML, images, et cetera) that act as alternate content should the user not have flash or javascript enabled. It also, when done properly, provides that alternate content to search engine spiders which don’t trigger javascript functions. In general, that has been a good solution for getting content on pages that are flash heavy, and is widely accepted as an industry standard solution.

This is all going to change, however, once HTML5 picks up steam. HTML5 introduces the <video> tag and deprecates the need to embed video as flash. The new video tag can use an actual video file as it’s source making the need for the flash interface unnecessary. The beauty of this format is that it is open source, therefore you get all the video viewing features of a flash implementation, but in a tag that is open to any platform to use. That means full screen viewing, jump to any point in the video and buffer from there, and custom styled controls without needing any plug-in.

More importantly to search, this means that alternate content for video is now supported as part of the standard instead of needing a third party solution on top of a plug-in.  Alternate HTML can simply be placed between the <video> start and end tags. This solution currently only addresses video content which doesn’t include interactive flash interfaces, but that is something the HTML5 canvas tag is hopefully going to pick up the slack on which I’ll address in a future post.

The HTML5 video element is currently supported by Firefox 3.5, Safari 3, Safari 4, Google Chrome, iPhone, and Andriod. Support is expected in upcoming versions of IE8.

Article by Joshua Tuscan