Musings of a Professional UK SEO Consultant

The Search Engine Results in Google are becoming more and more influenced by efforts to personalise the results for the searcher. This is nothing new but I thought that the video below contained some interesting detail that many would be unaware of.

In a recent interview with Webpro news Matt Cutts suggests that site load speed will have an effect on how a site is ranked, rewarding the faster sites over those that are less fast or just downright slow.

See: http://videos.webpronews.com/2009/11/13/matt-cutts-interview/

The good news is that the Google Caffeine launch will not take place early in 2010 to keep Webmasters happy over the holidays.

It seems to me that Barry Schwartz from searchengineland.com has hit the nail on the head in this article: http://searchengineland.com/site-speed-googles-next-ranking-factor-29793

Conclusions
This change is likely to be a very small part of the Google algorithm and unless your site is really slow and surrounded by other competing sites that load very quickly I don’t believe that most people will see a change in how their website is ranked.  The message is if it isn’t broke don’t fix it.

If you do want to improve your site load speed, check out the following sites:

http://www.webpagetest.org/

http://code.google.com/speed/ or http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

The following video explains how to improve your website performance with Page Speed:

Google Caffine (a major rewrite of a large chunk of how Google index web pages) looks set to launch, the sandbox that was set up by Google has now been retired http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Google state that “Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”

So what is going to be different:

• It looks like the results will be returned much faster
• It may change the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) but supposedly not by much
• Google will get better and better at prioritising Breaking News
• Mashable think it means a tough time for SEO’s (see link below)

While the sandbox was active Mashable reviewed it here: http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/google-caffeine/

This is What Matt Cutts had to say back in August 2009:

The latest video offering from Matt Cutts in which he talks about the importance of optimising your site images for Google Image Search.

This type of optimisation can be particularly important when imagery is integral to your business offering, for example if you are a photographer, designer or artist.

How to Optimise Images
Ann Smarty has written an excellent post on how to optimise images for people, Social Media and the Search Engines, see: http://www.seosmarty.com/image-seo/

Another Thought
If you really want to get your images out to a wider audience sites such as Flikr.com can also be a great way of posting your images and putting them in front of a large audience of image enthusiasts.

Google are Beta testing Social Search, a facility that shows relevant results from your friend’s social media pages including the likes of Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc.

Essentially Google are trying to present us with the most relevant information, our friends and connections are like us, so it follows that we are interested to hear what they say about the places, products and services that we are interested in.

To make social search work a user must have and be signed into their Google Profile (http://www.google.com/profiles) they must also connect that profile to at least one social networking site so that Google can start to identify their “Social Circle”.  When a user searches with their Google Profile enabled Google will find relevant public content from their friends and contacts and highlight it within the search results.

Google have been gravitating towards a more personalised search experience for some time http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/personally-speaking.html and have also been bumping up new content in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) for a while.

Essentially then Google continue to strive to provide the most relevant results to it’s users, it will be interesting to see how this develops, my initial thoughts are:

• It will be interesting to see how many people actually know about the Google Profile
• It is unclear how many people provide useful info on places, products and services when they use Twitter, Facebook etc.

To find out more see: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-social-search-i.html