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.
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The issue of page load time probably seems about as detached as you could probably get from traditional SEO, or at least it will if you have missed the recent news emanating from Google HQ. Yes, site speed is about to become a ranking factor.

As with any ranking factor, site speed will now come under the broader search engine optimisation umbrella. Now that a slow page load could be detrimental to other SEO efforts, it is essential that any issues are identified and corrected to ensure you don’t suffer a drop in rankings.
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The Internet is rarely a stable place. However, developments in the last few months, particularly in the realms of search, appear to far outweigh those in recent memory.

First of all in June, Bing gets announced. There’s a major furore as Microsoft sneaked it out a few days early, possibly in an attempt to avoid Google attempting to trump them – which they actually did with the announcement of Google Wave on the very same day.
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