After the announcement that Google has fully integrated Google Caffeine fully through out their entire data center a client asked us about what it all means. Below are the answers:
Original Google Post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
Great Video Explaining It: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoXVCmmETSs
What does that mean for website design and content?
What it means is Google is going to start indexing new content & changed content much faster. Your site won’t have to wait 4 months to be indexed again, if your content is fresh it has a better chance of being indexed and thrown to the top of the search engines much faster…that goes for press releases, videos, new web pages, changed web pages (constantly changing your site with new content is good), blog posts, etc…
Side Note: When 9/11 happened people searching for New York City or World Trade Center were not searching for tourism sites. They were trying to figure out what had just happened. Google now has the technology to determine what people are searching for with the power of social networks. Take twitter.com for example, Google is able to crawl twitter (links don’t count on twitter) and see what trends are happening on twitter (http://trendistic.com/). If they had this technology back in 9/11 Google would recognize that people are talking about planes hitting the world trade center and new blog posts, videos, and news would be thrown to the top of the search engines. Business owners should keep this in mind. If you are in the video visitation business and wrote a blog post about about “OJ Simpson” when the case was going on, your blog post may appear before OJ Simpson’s sporting profiles because Google would recognize that people want to read that information.
Does it then make more sense to have more LONG pages with more information on it instead of multiple pages?
I am a big fan of large pages that load fast. If that long page continues to add new useful information that helps the user find what they are looking for than create a long page. But, if you just create a long page for SEO reasons and the page is not useful I would not create it. I build web pages that cover a subject to the full. If a subject is large and can be broken down into multiple segments than break it down. So my answer is build a web page that covers your topic in the best way for the user, if that is a long page then create a long page, if it would be better to break it down…break it down. Don’t think about SEO on this one, think of the user.
Great Long Page: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
Is fresh content now worth more to google than ever?
Yes. Start doing research on Google Social Search too. Combine fresh content with those that follow you, and now you understand the direction Google is trying to go.
Are blogging websites now worth more to google? All these questions!
YES. Plus, a blog post, a video, a new web page, a press release, a white paper, or any form of fresh content is worth more to Google now more than ever.