| What Google Caffeine means to the webmaster | |
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The Google Caffeine roll out was supposed to happen last summer so by now we are a year late which suggest perhaps the sheer magnitude of the scope which Google have undertaken.
To understand what they have done is important perhaps to know a little about how search works and then you will understand just what has changed. But first things first. Straight from the horse’s mouth, the release of Google Caffeine means that: “With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”
What this means for the average webmaster is that Google has basically thrown away its old Google Index (yep! Cue for tension-adding drum roll, beads of sweat rolling down SEO foreheads and white knuckle biting moments as SERPs update) and introduced a new one which is faster, slicker and updates more quickly.
What does this really mean in terms of SEO?Google Caffeine’s indexing speed and ability to update partial crawlings faster make it the perfect search engine for the real time web. Real-time updates is where a huge chunk of the web is heading and the trend looks set to continue for some time precisely because it is so addictive from a user’s point of view.
This means that many of the SEO tricks and tips which were designed to make Google index a website faster are no longer necessary, but this also changes the search engine optimization metrics which made a website appear important in Google’s eyes and therefore appear on the first page of its search engine index.
Google officially confirms this: “…every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.”
The use of the real-time web and the social web as a means of successfully optimizing a website and leading relevant traffic to it is now of paramount importance. If, as a webmaster, you cannot think Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace you are losing out on a crucial element of SEO.
With a Google core search engine change this close to the next PageRank update this is a clear signal that Google is looking to kill two birds with one stone: specific filters designed to more closely and accurately address PageRank, linked to real-time web usage, social web popularity and a site’s multi-media content and web-presence away from its URL as a means of determining whether it is worthy of a first page (the only Google age which counts) listing.
Content is still king on the web but now so is plurality. Your Podcasts and Vlogging are as important as blogging.
In the weeks ahead there will be inevitable fallout and sorting and the ubiquitous sleepless nights by SEO experts (itself a little ironic as I am now writing this at 3.00am). The web is about to change again (or at least the way you can be found in it) and life for webmasters is about to become even more exciting.
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