Have you heard of Google Caffeine? We’re not talking about a brand new premium coffee product that will power super geeks for hours at a time. No, Google Caffeine is the new search index that was launched by Google at the beginning of June.
According to Google, the new index provides "50 percent fresher results for web searches” than its last index and is the largest collection of web content they’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.”
The exact details of this new index are, as usual, shrouded in secrecy. While Google provides some insights on Caffeine in this blog post, the search giant doesn’t go into great detail about how it is making these changes possible.
While this may all seem like a bunch of gobbledygook to you, it’s important to understand the impact this new search index can have on your Google page rankings. After all, isn’t it every marketer’s dream to have your website appear as the top organic result in a Google search?
Well have no fear! We’ve sifted through the gobbledygook for you to determine how Google Caffeine will impact your website:
Site and page load times. Speed is becoming a huge factor with the new Caffeine jolt. Caffeine takes page load times into consideration in their ranking algorithms. This means that websites that are heavy on the graphics and images, and consequently take longer to load, will likely go down in page rankings. Solution? Decrease page load time to increase SEO performance.
Keywords and keyword phrases. The new search cares more about keywords than it has in the past. Caffeine also has more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results. Keywords strings are search phrases, as opposed to single keywords. Make sure the copy on your website is full of relevant keywords and phrases.
Content remains king. Google Caffeine has been developed to find the highest quality content in the fastest possible time and then to present it to the end user in real time. As such, the launch of Caffeine reinforces the importance of having outstanding content on your website. Make sure you invest your resources in creating rich and relevant content.
Domain age. Caffeine places value on the age of your domain, meaning the amount of time since it was first registered. This means that brand new domains will struggle to make their way up on the Google results page.
While this certainly does not cover all of the changes Caffeine has introduced to the Google search game, it provides you with some basics that will help you adjust to the new search index.
Keep in mind that the web is constantly evolving and changing – as a marketer, it’s your job to make sure your website is changing right along with it. And if you need some help along the way – you know who to call!
Inga Rundquist
Inga Rundquist is a Public Relations Arsonist and Co-Owner at MindFire. When she’s not dreaming up ideas that will generate publicity, you can find her knee deep in the social media world, also known as the next PR frontier.
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