What has been the effect of Google’s Caffeine update?
Google’s much anticipated new search indexing system update (Google Caffeine) has sparked a wildfire of comments on webmasters and SEO forums. Google claims that Caffeine allows them to increase the speed of its search results by 50%. They can achieve this near real-time result by not having to build up a queue of crawled websites waiting to be put into the live index but by adding every crawled page to the index instantaneously. It seems obvious that Google wants to get faster in indexing and presenting the content with Caffeine. They don’t want to be left behind considering the growth in real-time search and where Yahoo and Bing are going with their developments.
Although Google played down the significance of the Caffeine update on the search ranking algorithm, there are several things SEO experts should re-consider.
The page load speed became an important ranking factor since Google puts more emphasis on speed. Pages including ‘heavy-on-bandwidth’ elements will see a drop in rankings.
Brand engagement in social media and blogging has never been more important than it is now. Caffeine means that Google can display the high quality, fresh and engaging content within minutes of being published.
Across the whole range of Pod1 ecommerce design clients, we noticed only slight changes in the rankings where blog sections became more prominent in Google results. We are also seeing more traffic coming to some of the bigger brands websites from the ‘Related Searches’ links at the bottom of Google results page. This would confirm one of many Caffeine theories that Google is favoring the “authority web sites” even more than before.
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