Good morning, Search Marketer, well, that was interesting.
Did your site experience the wonkiness of Monday's Google indexing glitch? What at first sight looked like a big algorithm update turned out to be a bug in Google's indexing system Caffeine. SEOs started noticing volatility around 1:30 p.m. ET on Monday. Google confirmed it fixed the problem around 12:40 a.m. ET Tuesday.
Some background: Google launched Caffeine in 2010 — read more about Caffeine here. As Garry Illyes of Google explained in a tweet yesterday, it's responsible for multiple tasks, from ingesting fetchlogs to extracting links, meta and structured data to scheduling new crawls and building the index. "Throw a grain of sand in the machinery and we have an outage like yesterday," he said, noting complexity of search.
Not so Genius. Remember the brouhaha last year over lyrics Google displayed in search results? Genius sued Google and LyricFind for lifting and misappropriating lyrics from its website.The case caught lots of attention, in part because, as Greg Sterling writes, "it played into the larger narratives of Google's market power and publisher frustrations with zero-click results."
A court has now cleared Google and Lyricfind of wrongdoing — music publishers, not Genius, own the lyrics, the court said. The larger implication here is that if your site licenses content, you likely have no recourse if search engines or others scrape and feature it on their own sites.
Claim your name. Authorship and Google+ died, but Google has launched "people cards" in Search. They can show up like Knowledge Panels in the results when users claim their card. The cards are tied to your Google account and are currently live on mobile in India.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
