Matt Cutts Talks Caffeine and Site Speed

Google’s Matt Cutts discussed two key ingredients of where Google is headed in an interview with WebProNews out in Vegas. The first of these ingredients is of course Google’s much discussed Algorithm update (Caffeine), which was recently found to begin rolling out soon.

The fact of the matter, as Matt himself says, is that it is only going live at one of Google’s data centers, and it is not even live yet, but will be before the holidays. That said, Caffeine will not roll out to the rest of Google’s data centers until after the holidays. He says that while Google could have rolled the update out faster, they didn’t want to upset webmasters by releasing it before the holidays. This is something that happened in the past when Google released its infamous Florida update before the holidays, causing rankings to drastically change. Cutts says not to panic.

Cutts also says that there might be an address set up soon where people can go and search, maybe not exclusively with Caffeine 100% of the time, but where queries will be more likely to hit the data center that’s hosting it.

The second ingredient that Matt discussed is that of site speed. From the sound of it, speed is going to be a huge factor in SEO moving in to 2010. He says that a number of people within Google consider speed to be very important to the web, and they are considering if that should play a role in the rankings of websites in search results.

According to Cutts, speed hasn’t played a role in rankings in the past, but that may very well change. Watch the video for more details about Caffeine and Google’s resources for helping webmasters improve site speed.

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Latest Drama with Canonical Tags and Duplicate Content

We first told you about the Canonical Tag back in February as the three major search players announced their joint effort. The industry responded favorably since the tag would give users more control as well as reduce duplicate content. The four major search engines now support the Canonical Link Element.

Now, nearly four months after the announcement, there seems to be a problem. During a session at SMX Advanced, Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts revealed that he had found some examples of the Canonical Tag not being obeyed by Google. He raises the issue that the Canonical Tag is merely a “hint” to Google and cannot be fully relied on.

As a result, Stephan recommends using 301 redirects since they are direct and will be obeyed. Stephan believes that Google misunderstood the explanation of his position since a debate broke out about nofollow and PR sculpting during the session and involved Matt Cutts and Nathan Buggia. Lisa Barone, who liveblogged the debate, recalls that Matt indicated that nofollow was not as effective as it once was. Nathan also stated Bing’s position that PR sculpting using nofollow was not a very valuable tactic for users to implement.

At this point, there has been no clarification of the issue. What are your thoughts? Do you agree with Stephan? How do you think this will get resolved?

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