Unless you have been living under a rock for the past decade, you will be very familiar with Google and their dominant position on the web. So powerful are Google within the search engine market, that it is more widely said that one is to ‘Google’ something rather than search for information online. Therefore it is no surprise that in order to remain at the top of a keyword related search online, you had best be keeping the Google indexing system happy with your site.

In August 2009 Google announced the launch of a new search and indexing architecture under the codename ‘Caffeine’. This is expected to hit the full public domain sometime within the next few months, although it is already active in a number of Google’s key datacentres. Caffine’s primary roll is to refresh Google’s overall indexing and search-return capabilities, switching focus more directly to speed. This means that search results are returned to users more quickly (some tests have shown results to be returned twice as quickly), and the Google index is better able to cope with rapidly changing information sources such as Facebook and Twitter. Of course this bodes well for businesses who consistently update and roll out new information, as there is no longer a need to wait for your site to be reindexed over a lengthy period of time. It also means that Facebook fan pages and Twitter updates (amongst other social media strategies) can now become a more active part of your sites overall page ranking.
Google will now be rewarding faster websites with higher page ranks, making speed not online a new priority for Google at their end of operations, but also for those businesses seeking to better their SEO and improve page rankings. This will have a direct positive impact on total site traffic, another key factor rewarded by Google’s new system architecture.

So how is this related to your dedicated servers and overall online services? Well for a start, with the new shift in focus towards site speed, the response times from your online location had better be very good. Unlimited bandwidth is also a must; as well as fast and reliable hardware to ensure internal data is processed quickly. This should then be coupled to a high-speed backbone directly onto the web, ensuring site visitors have the lowest possible latency times when interacting with your online location. Current research suggests that users are able to subconsciously discern speed differences from as little as one tenth of a second in loading times. This illustrates just how important speed has become to the modern world of web hosting.

The location of your dedicated server(s) is also highly important in gaining a respectable position within Google’s index. For a UK company, it is now more important than ever to keep your dedicated servers within the UK as well. In recent years many organisations have pushed their IT services abroad hoping for more solid financial returns without considering the quality and speed of the services received. Forgetting any SEO perks, it should be remembered that better site speed will also improve customer relations and the likely hood of customer visits to customer order conversions.

Netwise Hosting understand the needs of businesses in relation to Google’s new Caffeine architecture, and have been following the overall progress and all related details of the new functionality to ensure our services match the updated index. UK businesses can rest easy in the knowledge that the dedicated server packages from Netwise Hosting meet Google search guidelines, ensuring your hosted online presence is entirely optimised and ready for the best possible results on Google’s new architecture roll-out this year.