Google is starting to put much weight on outgoing link validation, specially with the Caffeine update.
Broken links seem to be an important factor now, the more broken links, the lower your site rank will be.
This way, they want to force webmasters to periodically check all links and remove or fix those dead.
There are a few problems:
- a large number of websites are no longer maintained, but they still have valuable information and there is no one to remove the dead links
- some broken links are broken only temporary, you could remove them, then when they are up again, it’s much likely you won’t notice to re-add them
- you could write a short post about something and continue with a link for details, so if the link becomes broken and you have to remove it, your post become useless, with a broken link it still could make some sense, people see you write about something which for some reason is not up anymore
- some sites have so many outgoing links, it’s pretty much impossible to make sure all of them are valid
Google has been working on some new technology that improves indexing infrastructure. They named it Caffeine. The aim is to make Google faster, more accurate and to give the ability to index more pages.
Currently the update is live only in one datacenter and in January 2010 it should go live on all of them.
Speed is now important.
A new factor in ranking will be the time it takes for a site to load, this means both hosting and site optimization will count.
This is a little strange, because Googlebot crawls from US, so websites that are hosted in Europe or Asia will generally take more time to respond than those nearby in US. The closer you will be to Google, the better ranking? Does this means Google wants to enter the Hosting Business? It could be a good plan, their customers will have faster sites, so they will be better ranked so competition will have to do the same.
Anyway, we’ll find out soon…
Twitter is a mini blogging service web site where millions of people post short text messages. The company emerged as the keeper of a valuable online index of real time facts, comments, and announcements, information that is very valuable for the Google search engine index.
There are rumors of close negotiations between Google and Twitter and we’ll probably see in the near future if the two companies end up in a formal partnership or collaboration.
Twitter is for sure a cool thing for Google to buy. The importance of real time search and the capability to capture this stream of twitter discussions is an important step in social media and search because users are trying to mine data for information that might otherwise be sought in a search engine.
Twitter can also be a good place for Google to sell ad space. However, Twitter is not a threat to Google in the on-line search market.
