Wednesday, 11 August 2010 01:51
Q: I've heard something about the Google "Caffeine" update. What do I need to know to keep my site well-ranked in Google after this update?
A: "Caffeine" was announced by Google back in August 2009, a year ago or so today - but in June of this year, specifics were finally released. "Caffeine" is mostly a technology update to ready Google for what they anticipate in an evolving web. The primary change seems to be faster discovery of new content on sites, and more storage for an overall large index of search results. Here's what Google's own blog says:
“Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”
Here's what I would recommend you would take from this as a site owner:
SEO guys have known for a while that Google likes a site that updates frequently with original, relevant content and "Caffeine" seems to be the technology to enable it to serve those kind of results in something a lot closer to real-time. Blog posts and site updates can now be presented even quicker, and if Google invested in the technology to do this, we can assume it makes up part of their vision of what content best satisfies a searcher.
Bottom line: If your site already has regular, new content, keep writing it! Feature some changing content on your main page occasionally, if possible. If your site has no content like this, here are some good ideas: Write a relevant blog. Have product reviews or testimonials. Share your expertise in as many forms as possible. Host discussions. Make videos or podcasts. Feature this content on product pages and not just its own isolated page. Write content to answer questions potential visitors would be interested. Do a Q & A.... and for any updating content, make sure an RSS feed exists to help the content be found and interact with different social properties (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
Multiple sites I've worked with have been seeing an increase in traffic for the long-tail - meaning, being found not just for the searches they've historically sought, but also for a wide array of relevant lesser terms, which can be a great source of entirely new customers. "Caffeine" enables Google to index and make available even the remote corners of your site - but, it is far more likely to if you update them and make them easy to find!
Bottom line: Now that Google can easily crawl, index, and serve your whole site, will it? Practicing good internal SEO by making sure your site follows all the best practices and makes all pages of your site easily findable and accessible will make that decision for Google. Improve the navigation to your more obscure content, create more of it, and keep your site healthy, and expect to be found for searches you've never been found for before.
With a faster and more parallel indexing system and a greater love of real-time results, expect a higher diversity of results, too. As has been already happening, video content, google base shopping results, and twitter / facebook posts are more likely to appear alongside normal search results. The effort you spend on diversifying the type of content you create means that many more possible appearances on the search results. One interesting confirmation of this is Google's addition of a "video sitemap" format, which helps Google to find the video content on your site. This seems to imply that your own site may be searched for video to offer to someone searching for a site like yours.
The best answer for "Caffeine" is to offer more. Your hard work is now that much more likely to reach the right people and help the right people reach you.