traffic-exchanges-explained

Google has announced it's next step to keep ahead of the search engine battle - no doubt there is little coincidence that this comes at a time when Yahoo and Microsoft have stated their intention of giving Google a run for its money in the search technology race. It is interesting to note what Google officially says what it is going to focus on with the new Caffeine technology:

size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.

These sparse words from Google are of course open to all sorts of interpretation but you do not have to be a rocket scientist to make some educated guesses at what they mean. "Size" probably is a hidden admission of Google that it is having a hard time to keep up with the number of web pages in existence and that they have to index more in a shorter period of time. This also ties in well with the reference to indexing speed as this would point to the importance of fresh content. It has become a web cliche that "content is king" but this statement from google would seem to infer that new rich content is what they are looking for. This could be good news for the little guy as it is already very evident, particularly with the increase in blogging, that there is a lot of fantastic content out there in every conceivable niche but it is hard to find as the small sites do not have the visibility of thh larger sites on search engines i.e. good content is not getting the search rewards it deserves. The use of the term "accuracy" would seem to back up this statement - info is becoming less generalised and more pinpointed - google wants to get at this rich info and give more accurate results for its users.

This overall strategy could see a major step in the maturing process of search engine technology. There are many already who believe that many of the traditional SEO criteria are redundant - i.e. keyword desnity. Google is perhaps going to take the emphasis off the importance of the number of inbound links and focus more on the relevancy and quality of the information it finds. That of course is going to be easier said than done.