Hello wonderful people,

I’m certain you read my post about the Google caffeine update or would have already read about it elsewhere. While it wasn’t in the Google search operating before the holidays but now it is.

I’m sure I would be among the last ones writing about the effects of this update but I think I should be letting everybody know a little about the effects of this update on my websites. So you know that it’s not fluff.

I track my website’s rankings on the tool rank checker by seobook, which is one of the must-have SEO tools that I mentioned a few months back. Since I’m updating to have a look at my rankings everyday and rank checker is kind enough to record updates every time I check the new ranking so that I can compare my rankings over time.

Please bare with me as I do not really know how to get graphical representation from excel data, so instead I’ll just point out some sudden changes that I noticed on my rankings.

I did not get time to read other people’s experiences but for my website, I saw a sudden bump on the 3rd of January 2010. More than half of my rankings had changed and this is not some sort of a Google dance.

I know this because I did not have any such thing done to my website since the last few months. Luckily, for me the bump was positive.

The Caffeinated Results

So basically, I have around 10 keywords on my rank checker list. Out of them I see an improvement in 5 of the keywords. With most of them moving from the second page to the top five of the first page.

Keywords with other websites improves as well so it is very hard for me to decide what has changed, although I have used different marketing strategies for almost all of my websites.

A little thing that I think has affected my website might be a little LSI. I don’t know what you call it but I find my website getting traffic from keywords that were not even mentioned on the page even once.

Those keywords were never even used in my linking and still my website was ranking fairly well for them. By this, I mean ranking above other websites which had this keyword optimized on their pages and also in their links. I find this pretty odd.

Maybe Google has started categorizing keywords and has made has made hubs of synonyms and knows that some content is related if it is trusted for the main keywords it has.

I’ll be looking further into this because I’m sure there is something bigger cooking up. Lastly, I’m stunned by the Google developers. Matt cutts was right. The whole Google algorithm change was so ‘under the hood’ that hardly any SEO out there can pin-point factors that have changed in their ranking methods.

So what changes have you experienced on your websites? Have you also seen an increase in the amount of visitors you get from Google? Or the vice-versa? What are your guesses might have changed in their algorithm. I would love to know.

Hey there fellow bloggers, money-makers or just internet users,

I’m definite you’re among the mass internet population that uses Google. If you don’t know yet, then please get to know that I love Google a lot.[sarcasm] After all it has done for me through it services, it has given me a head start in my online ventures[/sarcasm].

Jokes apart, I really think that Google is a great service and sends a lot of traffic to my website which makes it even better. So, this news has been surrounding the SEO community for a while and I just got to know about it a week ago.

Google’s officials have told that Google will be updating their search engine algorithms in the new update called ‘Caffeine’. In fact, this has been around since August and Google was kind enough to give a test of the caffeine run data center for us to check the difference on.

Well, they’ve taken it down now (sorry guys) but there would definitely be a few things for us to keep up on for good search results in 2010. I would highly recommend you to check out Matt Cutt’s blog post on this which includes a video explanation about it too. Or, you can view the video below:

For the record, this is going to be the biggest Google update after the post 2005 or early 2006 ‘big daddy’ update. While we can just expect for the search engine result pages to maintain the listings of our websites, such a thing might not be the case because Google had a total re-architecture built and lot of things changed.

Matt Cutts says that they tried their best to keep the Google index as it is. He also says that the results wouldn’t change so much and the average google searcher would not even notice the changes.

The power user, however, will notice some changes which is Google’s self-proclaimed ‘increase in search quality’. If you’re interested in knowing a few guesses which I think might be playing a big part in the coming up Caffeine update, then you can read on.

Internal links will have a little less effect

Unlike previously, according to some tests I put on the Caffeine sandbox, I noticed that pages that were highly dependant on internal links (links to a page from within the site) had a little negative change in their rankings.

Social media will play the BIGGEST part

It is still my guess, but I think that soon the ‘linking game’ in google’s algorithms will decrease in weightage over time. We all know that it is quite tough to game websites like digg, stumbleupon, etc. and this can be used by Google to it’s advantage.

When a website gets 500+ diggs it is obvious that this website is trustable and has good content. So I noticed a few results up on the demo Caffeine engine that seemed to be driven by social media backing.

Well, these are my guesses for the changes that might take place. I’m pretty sure that the changes will prove useful for the ‘white-hat’ seo-ers out there and I would definitely like to hear some stuff from the black hatters as well.

I can’t stress this enough. My respectable fellow bloggers around the blogosphere need to understand that the concept of pagerank sculpting died around late 2008. The reason why I thought of doing this post was because that many people still do not know about it and are nofollowing links on their blogs.

It is true that pagerank sculpting used to be really effective around a year ago but Matt Cutts wrote on his blog that they made this change around a year ago and he was sruprised that people didn’t notice the change.

What is Pagerank Sculpting?

I know that we have some beginners around and to make the whole scenario clear for them. Pagerank sculpting is was when you put a rel=”nofollow” tag on some links on your page to stop the link juice or the pagerank from flowing to them and use that to boost the juice being given to other pages that are link to.

However, since google has now dismissed pagerank sculpting, when you nofollow a link, you’re not saving the link juice or Pagerank, instead you’re allowing it to evaporate into thin air.

Now, instead of letting your link juice evaporate why wouldn’t you give that link a dofollow? It is going to be consumed anyways. The only person someone would put a nofollow at would be a an enemy.

While I’m not pushing you to make the blog comments dofollow, you may have your own reason (Comment spam). But at least, make all other links on your blog dofollow. Your blogroll, your top commentators’ list, links to other pages on your blog, etc.

I hope you get the point and make changes on your blog accordingly. For your information, this has been confirmed by Matt Cutts himself. The reason why I wrote this article was because yesterday I found over 50 blogs which had nofollow on either top commentators’ list, their blogroll or they were nofollowing links to their own blog (Which would be cutting your own legs).

Let me know what your views are on this topic. Whether you had nofollow on your blog before this or if you still have it then what is the reason for that nofollow tag. I’d be glad to hear.