However, just recently spam has not been limited to e-mails alone, it has also penetrated some search engines as well. You may have heard about the recent incident happening to the Google’s search engine. The Google’s search results have been flooded with spam as well and this is actually known as the webspam. The amount of webspam happening in the Google’s results has been a subject of recent discussions lately. However, some might be interested to know what webspam is.

For those who do not have any idea what webspam means, well webspam is actually the junk that you will find in your search results as the outcome of those websites who have managed to successfully cheat their way in order to get a higher position in the search results or simply those who violate the search engine quality guidelines.

This is actually not a new incident at all, but it has been quite noticeable lately because the incidents are really getting worse. And because of this Google seems to be paying close attention to the issue. As a matter of fact, in one of the blog post made by Matt Cutts — Google’s head for its quality search team — he stated that they are aware that spamming incidents have been on the rise recently and apparently Google will do its best in order to fix it.

In order to do so, Google is making some changes in its algorithm in order to specifically address the growing cases of spammy results in its search engine. In fact, they have launched a redesigned document level classifier that will make it harder for those spammy on-page contents to achieve a higher rank. This new classifier is an effective tool in detecting spam on individual web pages as well as in detecting hacked sites as well.

The year 2011 is believed to be the year that law firm websites will become publishing platforms. There is actually no question that the best law firm web strategy will require content publication as well as publicity. However, it is a known fact the many of these firms chooses to publish low-quality contents just to achieve more traffic.

And because of this It would be very interesting to know how the recent updates made by Google in its algorithm will affect these firms strategy or the so-called content farms in achieving more traffic in order to have a higher position in the search results. Well, the results are still to be seen.

Matt Cutts was again interviewed by WebProNews. Cutts had revealed more details on caffeine and the changes Google made on the architecture of its revised search engine. Those were really great and we’re excited as well to hear that. But one thing that is really bugging several blogs and website owners is when Cutts said “Google is considering the website’s speed (less loading time) as one of the factors to affect its (website) rankings”.

..We’re starting to think more and more about “should speed be a factor in google’s rankings?”. Because, even in adwords if your site is slow that could be a factor how much you have to pay (in adwords). Historically, we haven’t use that in our search rankings, but a lot of people in Google thinks that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience; so it’s fair to say that if you’re a fast site maybe you should get a little of a bonus (higher rank)…

You may want to listen to the whole interview. Here it is.

Most of the tools Matt Cutts revealed were widely used. Personally, I wasn’t entirely ‘thrilled’ using them. We’ll get to that in a moment. The main topic to discuss here is Google’s plan to include the website’s Speed as a factor to decide if it should rank well or not. It sounds bias and discriminating to several blog and website owners, especially newbies.

Big “Joe” website will dominate in Google

Of course, if you want a faster website you need more powerful hosting provider which will drive your expenditures high. Typical webmasters avail medium scale hosting services after consideration of their capital and revenues. Most probably they will not be able to buy expensive dedicated servers or higher hosting services. On the other hand, big websites don’t have problems implementing this. They have the capital/money to buy expensive and powerful hosting providers to beef up their site’s performance and decrease loading time.

Matt Cutts earlier revealed about tools to optimize your javascripts and online sites to monitor your site’s loading time. I told you I wasn’t excited using it for the reason that those are mere “indicators” and they can’t tell more details about your site. I used a similar web page analysis tool from Yahoo! called YSlow, and it’s a similar add-on with Firebug on Firefox. I ran it and got frustrated with the results not only because my site’s score was terrible but also my website was only a month old!

I ran another site(with alexa rating of 20K) and was “visually” running faster than mine. The results were almost “the same” in YSlow. I concluded that these tools only give you hints what your site’s performance is. Also, don’t believe 100% that by merely “optimizing” your javascripts and removing “junks” in your website you’ll notice significant difference in loading time. Those were crappy theories, what you need is a better, more powerful and obviously more expensive hosting provider.

Big sites don’t always have great content

Not all big website owners are big advocates of delivering excellent info and articles to their visitors. Some do, but several cares only about “money”. They can afford excellent web hosting services because they have the money to spend. Where do they get the funding? From their online business of course.

Mediocre business owners and websites may get wipe-out and out of business because of this policy. The average bloggers might not have the chance to be discovered. But, who cares?

Wrap up

Anyhow, Google always reap the rewards if speed will or will not become a factor on being rank high in SERP. Billions of internet users are using the web everyday and Big G has a large chunk of the share. We’re all at the mercy of Google, even if 1 million blog owners protest we really can’t do anything if Google decide this should be the way.

But don’t lose hope, as Matt Cutts said “We’re thinking”, this could be a hint that Google might consider not to implement this or find a way to make Google rankings a level playing field to all (cross your fingers).

Google Engineer Matt Cutts has revealed on his blog that Google is planning to release the new and improved version of its search engine system, ‘Google Caffeine’ or ‘Caffeine’ after the Holidays. If you remember, the Google Caffeine sandbox was introduced last August 2009 in order for webmasters and power searchers to try Google caffeine and give feedback on the system.

I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. said Matt Cutts.

You can read more about Google caffeine on its blog. Big G’s goal on introducing caffeine can be summarized on 3 aspects:

1. Better crawl and search of data
2. Better indexing of web pages
3. Faster performance

According to this interview, Matt Cutts described Caffeine as “re-writing of Google’s index system”. The key changes are efficiency in searching, more real time searching and faster delivery of searches. In general, people who tried Google caffeine on sandbox expressed positive reviews.

At this time, caffeine developer sandbox is down, Cutts answered that once the data center is up, IP address of the new caffeine sandbox will be given.