Google Caffeine Update – From SEO Perspective

Google announced about its Caffeine update on 10th of this month through Google Webmaster Blog. The Caffeine update is “under the hood” at the moment and general users would not see much difference to the search results due to this.

This Google update is going to be the next generation architecture for Google web search and would push multiple dimensions of the search functionality including size of index, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness.

While Matt Cutts have somewhat underplayed the chances of any major change in ranking and defined it as “rearchitecting or rewriting how we index pages” SEO s have already started speculating on the impact of Caffeine update. The blog posts by Matt Cutts and also at Google Webmaster blog seems to echo the same factors – Size, Indexing speed, accuracy”. As a derived conclusion from this I think most SEO s would be able to understand that.

How Caffeine Update Would Affect SEO

a) Size – Apparently means bigger Google index – more competition

b) Indexing Speed – Chances of getting content indexed faster thereby helping with ranking particulalrly for time sensitive content like news, scores etc. Real time search has been the buzz word in the search world recently and I wont be surprised if with this Caffeine update Google takes real time search to the next level.

c) Accuracy -some tweaks to the algo that would focus more on relevancy. To quote Matt Cutts, “Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change,”

Matt also mentioned that the Caffeine update would be infrastructure wise roughly comparable to Big Daddy Update – so its gonna be a major change but it will be rolled out slowly so regular users wont see much difference, power users might notice a few.

Unlike its prior algo updates, Google this time launched a sandbox environment for testing the Caffeine update at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ however, it seems to be down for maintenance at the moment. Google engineers have been actively seeking top level feedback from users in respect to the differences that they observe in the nature of search results at Google.com and the Caffeine sandbox.

You can check the video below where Mike from WebProNews interviews Matt on Caffeine update.