Google Caffeine – A Christmas Present From Google?

Posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 6:07 am.

Matt Cutts of Google recently announced that the “new version” of Google, dubbed Google Caffeine, will be fully rolled out after Christmas.

How will this change the search results and, perhaps more importantly, how will it affect your site rankings in Google’s search results?

Looking around the web, you will find various folks writing about their experiences with Caffeine while Google had their testing version open (nb: the testing version is no longer available).

There is no doubt that searching using Caffeine is a lot faster, which is one of the key elements of the upgrade for Google. It also seems to have a much bigger index (database) of pages, so you’re more likely to find what you want. Whether it’s more accurate is difficult to say, as that’s a subjective thing, but there don’t appear to be huge differences in pages listed for any given search result.

The other big move by Google is to get into real time search – indexing content from things like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. As people are turning to social media to find what they want, the search engines have to react and it’s no surprise that all the major engines have signed deals with Twitter to index their content. Expect Google Caffeine to include more (and more recent) social media content. That’s a message to us all – social media isn’t going away and your social media footprint is going to start encroaching more and more into search engine results, so spending time on social media will have the added benefit of additional exposure in search results.

So what about us, the website owners? What can we do to prepare for Caffeine’s roll out?

Well, there is some evidence that domain authority gets even greater weight in Caffeine – that makes life more difficult for smaller websites targeting specific (long tail) keywords.

It also means “more, more, more” when it comes to getting links to your website. I guess most of us knew that already though…

As recently stated by Google, they are likely to introduce website speed as a ranking factor, which is probably part of the Caffeine roll out – so make sure your site is on a decent server and loads nice and quickly!

One other thing that some people noticed is that Caffeine seems to give greater weight to keyword-rich Title Tags and body copy, so despite its predilection for links, Google isn’t abandoning good old on-page optimisation any time soon. Make sure your pages are optimised for your target keywords, as relying on links may see you slip slightly.

So, as Matt Cutts has said more than once, this is an “under the hood” serious infrastructure upgrade, not a huge ranking algorithm change. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, but there are bound to be some changes to your ranking for various keywords. If you’re following good SEO practice though, you should be fine. If you want some more help on what SEO best practice is, have a look at my forthcoming training events page.