Day one was tremendous as I discussed in my Pubcon session of the day post yesterday.  Could day two live up the the highly set bar from the previous day?   Well there were again some great sessions. Probably one of my favorite sessions of the day was the session on Google Caffeine and   MayDay.  The super session with Matt Cutts expects to be a highlight as well.

Interesting session that include a diverse set of speakers who discussed Google Caffeine, Google MayDay, and the increased importance of page speed.  Up first was one of my favourite speakers in Bruce Clay.  Bruce discussed  Google Caffeine and what it may mean for site owners and webmasters.

Bruce started out by suggesting that Caffeine is next gen architecture for Google.  It was created to support real-time and instant performance.  Bruce added that there is a much deeper and broader content capacity with Caffeine.  Some of the other points that Bruce mentioned:

• Caffeine means different crawling requirements
• Stale content will be crawled less often
• More links detected means more crawling
• It is estimated that only 2% of pages are seen in Google’s index (there are over a trillion pages that are out on the Web, Google only knows about a trillion of these.)
• Caffeine may mean that more local targeting may be on the Horizon
• On-page quality is gaining as a ranking factor
• Trust scores for link networks will become more important
• More spidered pages leads to adding lower quality pages
• Bruce feels, and I agree, that links are going to change.  The quality score of links will become even more important.  Sites that have a lot of low quality links may receive permanent damage (in terms of search engine rankings)
• Caffeine may mean that additional ranking factors (as many as 128-200) have been turned on
• “Likes” may become the new links.
• Video is now significant content
• Engagement is an increasingly important factor from a ranking perspective
• With recent changes to Google’s SERPs, with 30% of the queries, the top organic listing is now below the fold.  This will get worse.
• Siloing of content matters

Stoyan Stefanov from Yahoo discussed web performance optimization and had a pretty technical presentation but shared some great information.  Some of the key points and tools that Stoyan shared:

• He mentioned to understand and know the waterfall of your page load times
• Focus on the front end with optimization of things such as html, css, images etc.
• It is important to reduce the number of requests on a page.
• Combine all JS
• Combine all CSS
• Combine images into CSS sprites which basically creates one image that contains all of your images.  He mentioned the tools www.csssprites.com
• Reduce component size with things like compression, minification and lossless image optimization

Some additional tools Stoyan shared included:

• YSlow
• YUI Compressor
• Closure Compiler
• Firebug Next Panel

Brian Ussery was up next discussing the Google MayDay update.  His thoughts included:

• The MayDay update had an impact on sites “aggregated” sitewide
• Crawl to index time is 50% faster with Caffeine
• Use PUSH (Pubsubhuibbub) which is a tool that tells Google when you have content ready
• Use things such as RDFa, Microdata, Microformat
• MayDay raises the bar for long-tail content
• Quality content is important when addressing issues suffered from the Google MayDay update
• It is important to leverage unique content

So far, Pubcon has been a good experience.  More from Marketing Jive on Google Caffeine and Google's MayDay update.

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