SCOTIA SYSTEMS BLOG

Google have recently announced that they’re promoting a new open source image format known as “WebP”.

Speed

Google’s main drive for pushing this new format, is because it uses their open source VP8 encoding technology to shrink images to use hypothetically 40% less space than a JPEG.

Over the last year we’ve seen several moves by Google to convince webmasters to speed up the web, however this has to be their most ambitious yet.    To gain traction, they’ll need support from all the latest browsers, and also from graphic design tools.

Advantages for Googlebot

As well as the known SEO advantages of speed on the web, there is another small feature of WebP which could be aimed at improving Google’s Search Algorithm.    The WebP format is designed to include meta-data about the image.   This could mean that images using this format are easier for the Googlebot to interpret – giving it a greater understanding of the scope of the page.   Instead of looking at HTML title tags, Googlebot could look inside the image to determine the context of the image.

Further Resources

Google WebP Blog Announcement

Google WebP Project

Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Tags: Google, WebP

Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz has just posted an interesting article about how Google appear to be showing increasingly spammy entries in the SERPs.

While I agree with Rand’s conclusions, I thought it’d be interesting to compare the results with Bing so see if things are as just as bad?

Rand suggested that the following search terms provide spammy results when searching in Google:

So I decided to run the same queries through both Google and Bing, then compare the results.

What I found interesting is that when there isn’t much of an intersection in the results, it’s usually due to Bing listing more local (and less spammy) results than Google.  

Take for instance the “Birthday Party Supplies” query.   Most results returned by Bing were to local suppliers.

The following Venn diagrams illustrate the overlap in the results.   Google results are shown as yellow and Bing results are shown as orange.

SEO Software

Starcraft 2 Strategies

Birthday Party Supplies

Currency Trading Online

Tennis Racquet Review

s

Leather Crafting Supplies

Nanny Services

Home Business Ideas

French Doors

Vietnam Tours

Antioxidant Supplements

Home Espresso Machine Ratings

Posted in SEO | No Comments »
Tags: Bing, Google, SEO, SEOMoz

Google’s Matt Cutts is giving a keynote at SMX and is discussing the roll out of the Caffeine update.

Apparently in the last few days, Caffeine went live on all data centers.  

According to Matt, in the past Google used to roll out large updates using a “Google Dance” whereby datacenters updated gradually.   In 2003 Google introduced an incremental indexing system in which they crawled 10% of the web every night which was pushed out to all datacenters nightly.   This update system was known as Fritz.

The new crawl algorithm is now known as Caffeine.   With the new update, pages crawled are immediately added to the index and will instantly appear in the SERPs.

According to Matt – the results are 50% fresher and Caffeine enables Google to scale up their index in a massive way.

Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »
Tags: Caffeine, Google