How will Caffeine affect my rankings in Google

Posted by Redfox on December 15, 2009

How will Caffeine affect my rankings in Google?

In August, Google announced the upcoming roll out of the Google
Caffeine infrastructure. Google was quick to point out that they
would not launch the new infrastructure until after the Christmas
holiday shopping season — giving many online retail stores
confidence for the upcoming Christmas shopping season.

In the August announcement, Google described Caffeine this way:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been
working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for
Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will
let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy,
comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure
sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means
that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But
web developers and power searchers might notice a few
differences…”

After Thanksgiving, Google said that they had taken Caffeine out
of its “sandbox” phase, and that it launched Caffeine on only
one of its Data Centers. Search Engine Land was able to confirm
that Google had launched Caffeine on the IP address
209.85.225.103, and it was running on this IP address for at
least half of its searches. However, the full roll out of
Caffeine continues to remain in holding pattern, until after the
Christmas season.

Analyzing Google’s Search Engine Result Pages…

Several online publishers and SEO companies jumped into testing
the Google Caffeine search results in August, when the original
announcement was made public.

The results of testing were somewhat mixed…

* Everyone pretty much agreed that the Caffeine infrastructure
was faster than the original Google infrastructure, except for
results that included Advanced Search queries, such as when you
are using subtraction signs, quotes in query, etc. Mashable
suggested that Google Caffeine actually doubled the speed of a
Google search.

* Google Caffeine tends to show a larger data set for the number
of search results for a particular search.

* The weighting of Video and Universal Search is scaled back in
Caffeine.

* A slight value increase to exact match domain names.

* Google seems to be putting a little bit more emphasis on the
age of a website.

* An increased weight for domain authority and tag pages on
authority websites.

* A substantial increase in weight for social media websites.
Currently FriendFeed seems to carry more weight than Twitter or
FaceBook.

* Google Caffeine has shown a tendency to put more weight on
keyword phrases or keyword strings, as opposed to singular
keywords.

* Another major change, which is a reflection of how Google
deals with breaking news stories, is that Google is willing to
show the title and a description of a page, before it even caches
the page in its index.

An interesting change in the Google Search Engine Results that I
noted while doing the research for this article is that about
half-way down the page, Google has added a real-time element to
news items…

What they have done is to load a self-updating Iframe to the
search results that shows updated news items on a topic as they
become available. The image results are located just under this
real-time news block. You can see it now, by doing a quick Google
search for Barack Obama.

Also of interest about this real-time news window is that it is
actually capturing some of its results from Twitter and other
social media websites.

What This Means To Webmasters and SEO Providers…

If you have been relying upon video to push you to the top of
Google’s search results, this is no longer a sure-fire method of
achieving top search placement quickly.

If you thought that Twitter and other social media websites were
worthless to you in Google, then you might start taking a second
look.

If you are not getting listings or mentions on authority
websites, then you may be missing out on some SEO opportunities.

If you have a keyword-heavy domain name, then your investment may
start to help you more going forward.

If you have focused on single keywords and bypassed keyword
strings for optimization, you may begin paying heavily for that
decision going forward.

Domain age will become more important after Caffeine is fully
rolled out, so it is in our best interests to seek links from
older websites and to put more emphasis on older sites in our
domain portfolios.

Old Google vs New Google Comparisons

Some SEO Providers have noted major changes between the two
search engines, although in my own experience, the placement for
my target keywords has not suffered, but I have not made major
gains either.

In the Old Google, I could put a search result on page one of
Google in as little as 15 minutes. I hope that remains unchanged
moving forward into the future. Of course my stuff isn’t news,
so I will be holding my breath that I can put a web page on page
one of Google in only a few minutes — going forward.

The main difference we are going to see going forward is the
emphasis on keyword strings as opposed to keywords in the new
Google Caffeine roll-out.

If you have been targeting single keywords for your website or
the website’s of your clients, be prepared to scramble to
overcome your losses in Google’s search rankings… But if you
have been targeting those long-tail keywords for any length of
time, then you will probably be dancing on the ceiling once
Google Caffeine is live across all of its data centers.

In Conclusion…

We have seen a lot of testimony that Google will not change its
appearance that much after the Google Caffeine roll-out…

But we have seen enough testimony to expect that some people will
be crying rivers of tears, while others will be dancing the jig,
after the Google Caffeine launch…

The only thing we can know for sure at this point, is that we
really won’t know the impact of Caffeine until after the
roll-out as 2010 gets underway.

———————————————————-
Trey Pennewell is a writer who has written about SEO and online
business for a number of years. He encourages you to learn about
and purchase the new SEO ebook titled, “Karma SEO and the Great
Search Engine Ranking Dance” at http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com/

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