Google rolled out two updates recently, Caffeine, and the Mayday update.

The quick takeaway, according to Google’s Matt Cutts, is that Caffeine is a complete overhaul of how Google indexes the web, and they are now able to index it much, much faster. In some instances, webpage updates are being indexed by Google in near real-time. WebProNews is following the updates closely, and you can read their analysis here. WPN also did this interview with Matt Cutts that is worth watching:

It’s worth noting that Matt emphasizes that the Caffeine update does not affect how Google ranks sites (for that, see Mayday) but it’s all about speed of indexing, size of index, and so forth. However, in the same interview, he did say that Caffeine includes better spam filters, including filters to catch paid text links.

The Mayday update, by contrast, does affect how sites are ranked. The recent update is an algorithm change, and according to Mr. Cutts, it is designed to improve the user experience by spotting quality signals (or lack thereof) on webpages. What does that mean? Well, in layman’s English it means crappy pages, especially pages that might show up in the SERPs for long tail searches, will have a harder time ranking in future. Auto-generated pages, and content farms, will be hit the hardest, according to Cutts. How to deal with it? Same old same old. Put out better quality, unique content for the user. Can you ever remember a time when Google didn’t say that?

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