Should Google Caffeine give you the jitters?
Faith Johnstone on Wednesday, 11th November, 2009
Photo by Espen Klum
Google Caffeine, the worst kept “top secret” project of 2009 is ready for roll out early next year. After a flurry of speculation caused by the beta version disappearing, Google blogger Matt Cutts confirmed the news that one of your New Year’s resolutions is going to be “check my position in the Google rankings”. For now though, we wait.
But what are we waiting for, exactly?
On the surface, Google search won’t look too different. Video and news results will appear half way down the first page instead of at the top, which is hardly revolutionary. Instead, Google have focused their efforts on what happens behind the scenes, in the elusive indexing algorithm that determines the fate of your website in the natural search rankings.
It’s difficult to tell you exactly what the impact of Google Caffeine is going to be until it goes live, but there are some clues out there which indicate how our current non-caffeinated search is going to improve. Mashable conducted a detailed comparison of Google Caffeine back in August explaining the difference in old search vs. the new release, and in summary we should expect Google to:
- Be faster
- Give more relevance to keywords than before
- Increase the size of search results
There is also evidence to suggest results from social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been given a boost, with Caffeine able to produce searches of real-time content like status updates and tweets. This means social media and search just got cosier.
What now for your search marketing plans?
In the short-term, it seems Google Caffeine is going to provide some subtle improvements to the mechanics behind Google search without impacting your search ranking in a significant way – for now. However, once released we recommend checking the impact on your key landing pages to ensure you have not dropped in rankings in a significant way.
In the long-term search engine optimisation just got trickier. The results of various studies into Google Caffeine have all found relevance of content being more important than ever before. Glossing over keyword research in the future will put you at a serious disadvantage if you want to compete for popular phrases. For people who have dismissed social media’s ability to provide ROI, Google Caffeine is an interesting development. Search marketing and social media are set to become the best of friends. Now is the time to start thinking about your social media strategy if you haven’t already.
If you have any questions or thoughts on the impact of Google Caffeine we’d love to hear your comments below.
Great post Faith.
Very interesting times ahead for businesses that rely on Google to drive most of their revenue. I suspect there will be some very unhappy people when their site disappears from page 1 of Google, but equally some others who will be over the moon when their traffic shoots up. We’ll certainly be watching to see how Caffeine affects our clients.
Interestng times indeed.
This could mean that any business that is less than fully committed to organic seo could find its website trumped by its own tweets and Facebook updates using the company name.
A significant development in the terms of social media engagement and something that will surely focus the minds of online marketers.
It will be very interesting to see how this goes, as Google’s previous attempts to intergrate videos, news and blog posts into organic search results have not been roaring successes.
The sheer volume of content produced on UGC-based sites could make for some interesting search results, seeing as how Google news often struggles to return the best resource for a story.