SEO Blog

Well it has finally happened, Google have rolled out the Panda update to all English language sites – including the UK of course. Therefore the shifting sands of search have washed up on these shores, helping some to get noticed whilst others are swept out to sea (never to be seen again).

Unsurprisingly it has very much followed the same pattern as we saw when it was initially launched in the United States, with sites featuring limited or duplicate content suffering most. This has seen many comparison sites, article directories and online voucher providers plummet down the SERPs.
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There have been rumours flying about Google Caffeine since it was first mooted late last year. Hearsay took over from facts pretty early on, giving Caffeine a reputation for being a potential SEO killer. Early evidence suggests it is anything but.

Finally rolled out on Tuesday [see: Our new search index: Caffeine | Official Google Blog] Caffeine is a new index system for the world’s most popular search engine. Rather than taking a month to index pages, Caffeine can get it done almost within days, hours and even minutes. It is designed to give new content a platform and remove older, less relevant results. This makes it far more relevant to news providers than it does to most general websites.

The one issue that might come into practice is the fact that stronger sites who regularly update content will be indexed quicker. This is Google’s way of ensuring that authority sites are given priority. In the most part this shouldn’t cause you any undue hardship, particularly as your own pages should now be indexed far quicker than they were previously. Theoretically you could be leapfrogged by these sites when new content is released.
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In short, because Google says so. But to say it doesn’t matter at all is a bit of an overstatement. Essentially, PageRank was always a guide of how strong a website’s linking structure was. Over the years though, as the Google algorithm developed, this guide slowly lost importance; unfortunately people still continued to give it their full attention.

PageRank has been a metric by which SEO professionals and webmasters measure the strength of a site. The higher on the 0-10 scale a site would appear, the more successful their efforts had been. But as new ranking factors were introduced, it slowly lost prominence.
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