Google Matt Cutts Explains Caffeine Update

Google announced yesterday that it has been working on a project called “Caffeine” that will re-write the architecture for Google’s Web search. As Matt Cutts shares exclusively with WebProNews, Caffeine is comparable to the “Big Daddy Update” back in 2005, which consisted of changes to the way Google crawls and indexes websites.

How much of an impact will Caffeine have on results? Matt says there will, hopefully, not be a big difference. Google will integrate Caffeine slowly and take user feedback into consideration.

Matt says, “If we push forward as fast as we can, double down on innovation and try to do the best that we can, [and] do the right thing for users, everything else will work out.”

This infrastructure modification will lay the foundation for future indexing changes and will also allow for the expansion of website speed and size. Incidentally, it could even provide a stronger architecture for potential real-time and semantic efforts.

If you would like to try Caffeine, you can check it out at: http://www2.sandbox.google.com.

Google Introduces Google Friend Connect API

Once again, Matt Cutts broke Google news for us. He introduced Google Friend Connect API at PubCon South in Austin, Texas and WebProNews has exclusive details in the above video.

Matt prefaced the announcement by explaining how we are all publishers now due to YouTube, Facebook, blogs, etc. He went on to say how spam should not be large concern because at this point in time, the focus should be primarily on creating good content. After considering those factors, Google released the Google Friend Connect API to help both publishers and users become more social.

Google Friend Connect API provides more participation, comments, interactions, and also less spam. A couple of people on Matt’s own team produced plugins for WordPress, Drupal, and phpBB.

Matt makes no claim of perfection on this and even strongly encourages others to create better plugins since they are all Open Source.

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Breaking News: Matt Cutts Explains “Canonical Tag” from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced today a joint effort to help reduce duplicate content. The three major search engines came together to allow users to point out their preferred version of a url. As Matt Cutts explains in this video, this format offers users more control.

Duplicate content has been a challenging issue for a long time. Websites containing a lot of content such as a retail site, could end up with several urls for each page making it difficult for search engines to crawl.

Google gives the following example on the Webmaster Central blog:

Simply place this link tag in the head section of the duplicate content urls.

The tag can only be used on pages within a single site. Both absolute and relative links are acceptable, but the search engines recommend absolute links. Also, links to all urls will be directed to the one preferred url.

For more information, each of the search engines have explanations and examples in their own announcements: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Also, be sure to look for the rest of our video interview with Matt Cutts that includes his take on Google penalizing Google Japan, top security issues for 2009, and Google’s continued efforts with personalized search. The extended version will be available very soon.

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