Google's "Caffeine" Update Has Arrived

The SEO community was all abuzz yesterday after Google confirmed some major changes to their search engine indexing algorithm. The update, which was code named “Caffeine,” came just a few weeks after the controversial “Mayday” ranking update, and included some interesting features. Here’s what you need to know.

Caffeine – Search Results in Seconds

According to the official Google Blog, the new Caffeine update provides 50% fresher results for web searches than the former indexing update. Basically this means that Google now has the capability to find and display new content published to the Internet within seconds. Be it a blog post, news column, or wiki update, Google will find it faster, and thus so will you. Caffeine works by analyzing the web in small portions and updating the search index in a continuous manner. This allows Caffeine the ability to index pages on an enormous scale. Faster indexing means fresher results, no matter when or where the information is published.

There’s a Catch, of Course

While Caffeine is designed to index practically any and all information posted to the Internet, it isn’t without a few catches. Not every change on the net will be noticed immediately. Google will still look at factors like page rank in order to determine which sites to crawl and index faster.  It is believed that the system will also check news sites and blogs more often than standard websites.

How Caffeine Effects Your Website

So what does this mean to your small business website? Well, for one thing, you need to update your site regularly. If you aren’t blogging, now’s the time to start. Secondly, you need to post about relevant, timely topics. Say, for example, you own a small sporting goods store. You’ve got a better chance of Google indexing today’s blog post if you mention your line of World Cup merchandise, or how you’re taking orders for limited edition Patrick Kane Stanley Cup Championship t-shirts (way to end that drought Blackhawks!). Small business owners will still need to focus on traditional search engine optimization techniques in order to raise their page rank (things like backlinking and keyword usage), but constant content is definitely something you need to start making time for.

The Reason Behind the Caffeine Update

If you’re looking for the motivation behind Google’s latest update, September 11, 2001 is a good place to start. The attacks on the World Trade Center marked a turning point for online search – people everywhere wanted up-to-the-minute information; essentially, the demand for real time search was born. The events of September 11^th spurred Google to create a system that was capable of finding, indexing, and returning new content almost instantly, as is the case with the new Caffeine update.

A Quick Look at Mayday

The Mayday update, which was rolled out in late May, is a purely ranking change. This means that sites seeing less traffic (like small business websites) will still be indexed, but will likely be ranked differently based on new algorithm tweaks. The rankings change is most obvious for “long-tail” search queries. Long-tail queries are longer, less popular search topics. For example, “Chatham Ontario iPod Nano 5^th generation sale” is a long-tail search term. Most people would simply search “Chatham iPod Nano” or “iPod Nano in Chatham.” While it’s unclear what Google has done to change their ranking mechanisms, one thing is for certain – competition for long-tail queries has just become far more heated. In order to take advantage of the new Mayday update, CIK Marketing recommends focusing on your website’s product descriptions. Unique descriptions are far more likely to catch Google’s eye than standard merchant-supplied snippets.

How is your small business website adjusting to the Caffeine and Mayday updates? Leave a comment and let us know.