Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s spam team, announced yesterday at SMX Advanced Seattle 2010 that Caffeine is officially live and shared some of the ways their new index is different from the old Google.

In the old days… Google would crawl the billions of pages on the internet, index them all and then update one of their data centers with all the information they gathered.  They would continue to do this to each of their data centers over several days until everything was up to date.  This was affectionately known as the Google Dance.  The problem was that you might have to wait a bit before you could find your pages in Google index or you might see different results in the SERP’s depending on which data center you hit when you searched.

With the release of Caffeine, there is a new Sheriff in town. Instead of crawling the billions upon billions of pages on the internet first and then updating a single index, Caffeine can now crawl a document, process it and then immediately pushes it out to all of their indexes.  This makes Google’s indexing a much more dynamic entity and allows the user to find information closer to “real time” then ever before.

In fact, Matt stated that Google’s entire index is about 50% fresher than it ever was before.  NICE!  So…, instead of waiting days or weeks for your new or updated pages to be indexed, once Google crawls your page they can almost immediately push it out to their engine for the world to see.  Caffeine’s new way of indexing the web also make it easier for Google to scale up and grow their search engine with even more relevant results for their users.

According to the official Google blog post, “Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.” Now that’s a lot of data.

From my perspective, Caffeine is set to bring forth a new level of near-real-time search to the market they already dominate.  I gotta say…. I LIKE IT!!!

Here’s Matt talking about Caffeine at SMX.

Steve Scott is the owner of the Tampa SEO Training Academy

At first I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with it.  The instructions said I should put the claim token into a post on my blog but that seemed a bit odd.  Couldn’t somebody else then use the claim token from my blog post for their own purposes?  Not really sure how that would be useful… but it did kinda feel like I was putting up a password of some kind into the public domain.   Not something I do willingly.

So anyway… as I sometimes do, I did a little searching around and found the following link on Technorati’s site: http://technorati.com/blog-claiming-faq/.

The faq page lists all the details on how and why Technorati uses a claim token to verify my site.  Basically, by putting my claim token into an actual blog post and making sure it is visible in my sites feed, Technorati could tell that I had the administrative rights to place posts on the blog I am trying to list with them.

By claiming my blog using the token, Technorati will now list me in the categories and for the tags that I previously assigned to my blog when I registered it.  It also enables me to see links from existing sites in their index that point back to to my blog.  That all certainly sounded like a good reason to go for it.

This claim token process reminded me a lot of using a verification code for Google Webmaster Tools.  In order to verify you are a webmaster of a particular site, Google requires you to put a piece of HTML code onto your web sites homepage.  Once you can prove to Google you can make changes to your site that no one else could, they open the front door into what they know about your site and how you can improve it. (If you are not using Google Webmaster Tools you should do so immediately!)

In addition, verifying my blog using the Technorati claim token allows it to show on my Technorati public profile page… also a good thing.

To my amusement, they even mentioned that I might think it was a little weird putting a verification code onto one of my blog post but they say “it’s the best method we’ve found so far to demonstrate to us that you control the blog.”

Technorati also advises that you “remove the code once the claim is complete.”  So, if you have read this post and my claim code above has a bunch of goble-dee-goop for a claim token, you’ll know that my site has finally been verified.

Now, why don’t you go try it yourself.  Just register with Technorati and off you go!

Happy Blogging…

Steve

Steve Scott is the owner of the Tampa SEO Training Academy

However, you would never talk to an interior decorator before you spoke with an architect or a contractor, would you? A Search Marketer is the “architect” you need to speak with before you design your website. They can help you not only design your site correctly but also help you develop your online strategy and build your brand.

Remember, it’s not that the web designer is doing anything wrong or trying to hurt your chances at getting found. It’s just that most web designers and programmers do not have the knowledge or the level of understanding regarding many critical SEO aspects and can inadvertently cause your site to do poorly in the Search Engines.

So here’s a small bit of advice… don’t make the same mistake so many others do when it comes to their website. Talk to a reputable SEO company or get yourself educated before you decide to design or redesign a website for your business.

Steve Scott
Owner and Head Trainer
Tampa SEO Training Academy