October 2009 Google Webmaster Report

I am currently in transit to the SMX East conference and I am going to try to do some blog posts while in the car (no I am not driving). As we normally do, at the beginning of each month, we summarize an ongoing WebmasterWorld thread that tracks and discusses changes at Google's web search. It looks at indexes, algorithms and fluctuations in the index. You can find last months report, the September 2009 report, also.

The thread mostly currently discusses a blog post from a storage guru, which explains why Google may have been moving towards the Caffeine update and the new file system, GFSII. Here is a quote:

A couple of years ago at the first Seattle Conference on Scalability, Google's Jeffrey Dean remarked that the company wanted 100x more scalability. Unsurprising given the rapid growth of the web. But there was more to it than that: GFS - the Google File System was running out of scalability.

It also discusses the weight Google gives keywords in file names and domain names, new pages ranking highly quickly and some people having issues with accessing the various Google properties over the weekend.

Here are the more important Google topics we discussed in the past month: