SEO Blog

There have been rumours flying about Google Caffeine since it was first mooted late last year. Hearsay took over from facts pretty early on, giving Caffeine a reputation for being a potential SEO killer. Early evidence suggests it is anything but.

Finally rolled out on Tuesday [see: Our new search index: Caffeine | Official Google Blog] Caffeine is a new index system for the world’s most popular search engine. Rather than taking a month to index pages, Caffeine can get it done almost within days, hours and even minutes. It is designed to give new content a platform and remove older, less relevant results. This makes it far more relevant to news providers than it does to most general websites.

The one issue that might come into practice is the fact that stronger sites who regularly update content will be indexed quicker. This is Google’s way of ensuring that authority sites are given priority. In the most part this shouldn’t cause you any undue hardship, particularly as your own pages should now be indexed far quicker than they were previously. Theoretically you could be leapfrogged by these sites when new content is released.

Only time will really tell on how much it will affect search traffic. Clearly Google are looking to freshen up their SERPs and provide the best, relevant information much quicker. Whilst it could potentially be detrimental to SEO efforts, you will only really be able to measure this over a reasonably lengthy time period. There’s certainly no evidence that this update is something to fear.

Unfortunately each time Google does make a change to its search engine algorithm or indexing it is met with a fair amount of trepidation. Not without good reason to be fair though. Because Google commands such a huge percentage of the search market globally (in the UK it is a little over 92%), even the slightest change in a site’s rankings can have huge implications on traffic.

As most SEOs work primarily with Google in mind, any update could potentially wipe out a fair percentage of the hard work that they’ve put in. Caffeine promised to speed up the whole search process, which had many of us wondering who exactly would be the beneficiary of all this. Worse still, we wondered who might suffer as a result.

From a searcher’s point of view, results, particularly in the news and real-time elements, should be bang up to date. They should also be returned quicker thanks to the super-fast data centres that Google are now employing. That can only be a positive thing.

But as I say, this Caffeine update shouldn’t have a massively negative impact on any site. In many ways it has been overshadowed by the Mayday update that came right out of the blue last month. That has already had measurable results on a variety of sites, some hugely positive others massively negative. This quicker indexing is small fry in comparison.

If you have noticed any significant changes in your results already, please let me know. I’m always interested to hear about authentic accounts rather than the usual industry speculation we all here.