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Man is my day ever out of control Here it is lunchtime and I'm only just sitting down to write today's column. I usually have it done by 9am but not today ... so far today has been taken up with writing proposals and quotes, talking business on the phone and packing.

Yes, we're still packing for the move next week. It's hard to believe that two people could accumulate so much stuff that we just can't get rid off. I pity any would-be burglar who tried to sneak in of a night. The boxes are stacked so high that if he bumped into one of the stacks they'd fall on him and probably kill him.

Caffeine
No, I don't need coffee ... a sedative might be nice but I definitely don't need coffee. The Caffiene I'm talking about is the new version of Google that we're all allowed to play with.

It's only been live for a couple of days but already we're seeing people coming up with their predictions about what will happen to search when Caffeine becomes the only version of Google. For our part both Steve and I think that it's way too early to make any definite predictions about what Caffeine will do to search engine rankings but others are being bold and making pronouncements about what Caffeine might mean to us all.

I watched a video of Matt Cutts being interviewed about it yesterday and basically what he said made us both think that Caffeine is more about how Google crawls and produces results than about how it ranks pages. However Matt might have just been a little shy about talking about rankings so we probably can't read too much into what he said in the interview.

Some 'experts' are suggesting ... based, it seems, on just one or two examples ... that Caffeine will mean a sharp drop in the value of links from forums and blogs. Now I'll probably leap for joy if that's the case because I've seen some very skewed search engine results that seem to be dominated by a couple of sites that have hundreds and hundreds of backlinks from a couple of forums and very little in the way of content.

At the moment though we're not seeing any real changes in the Caffeine results although some are reporting changes of at least 50% in some search verticals. It will be interesting to watch and that's about all we'll be doing at the moment. If you haven't seen the Caffeine version of Google just go to www2.sandbox.gooogle.com and you'll be able to play with it too.

Link placement
Speaking of links Steve and I are beginning to agree with a few people out there who feel sure that Google and Bing place much more importance on some links rather than others and it's the placement of the links that seems to help Google decide which ones are important and which ones aren't.

For a long time now it's been fairly well-known that links at the bottom of a page were not as valuable as links in other parts of the web page but what about links on the right or left hand side of the page? What about links in the body of the page?

I guess it doesn't matter a great deal from a search engine perspective if you're building free sites or galleries but if you're looking to build up a network of sites that will feed some value into a central point then where you put your links can be very important and we're beginning to think that the greatest value isn't in any columns on the right or left hand side of the page.

Of course those links can pass some value but I'd suggest that if you're looking for the best placement for links that will pass the most value then you start putting them in the first two or maybe three paragraphs on a your page. Anywhere after that and the value of those links begins to diminish.

And why do we think that? Well we have been doing our own testing but just recently Yahoo obtained a patent on page segmentation and that now makes all three of the major search engines to have something patented about page segmentation. Of course Yahoo isn't going to be around much longer but it's obvious that if all three search engines are looking at the different parts of a page then it's something we should be considering too.

And now it's time for me to try and catch up with the rest of today's schedule ... somehow I don't think I'm going to get ahead today but I can hope. I can also hope you guys have a great day too and make some great sales.