In case you missed it, Google officially announced that the long awaited Google Caffeine is now here. And rather than calling it an update to their search algorithm, they are calling it their ‘new web indexing system.’ Caffeine had been live on a few data centers since the beginning of the year, but now it is used for all search results that Google delivers. So what does this mean for you?
As a searcher it means that the results you receive from Google should be delivered quicker, and they should be more relevant to your search query. Very good things.
As a website owner, it means that your website updates should be seen by Google much faster than before, so your new products and services have the ability to show up on results pages much sooner. Hooray! But this also means that your competitors have that same ability as well. Ouch. And Google will be looking at more web pages than ever before, possibly increasing the competition. Double Ouch!
What should you do? Successful website owners and managers should continue to do what they have always done. Build a website with great content. Make it search engine friendly from development through design through content. Make it user friendly. Optimize it. These basics haven’t really changed. It’s the pace at which you may have to do some of these things that will change.
One element to keep in mind is page load speed. This has been a factor in search engine rankings in the past – it’s just that now the bar has been set a bit higher. The faster you can get your page to load the more highly Google will think of it (and your site visitors will be appreciative as well). Minimizing image size, removing unused elements from the code, combine external files (CSS and JavaScript) and streamlining code are just a few ways to decrease page load speed.
One piece of advice, at least for a while, would be to check your site analytics more frequently than you normally do, and check your rankings (manually of course) more often as well. The truth is that even though we have an idea of what Google Caffeine means to us, no one can really predict what exactly will happen to any particular website. If you stay on top of how your website and traffic changes with the update, you’ll be well ahead of the game.
So have you noticed any major changes to your website’s rankings or traffic over the past week? I know I’ve seen a handful of jumps, but considering we work with hundreds of sites and thousands of phrases, that doesn’t sound like too many. How about you?
