During the Summer Google made an announcement about a new project they are rolling out, they call it ‘Caffeine’. Caffeine is described as a re-write of the current search architecture, Matt Cutts suggested that many searches would stay the same but be faster.

At the time of this announcement, Matt Cutts discussed this new update with WebProNews. He suggested that it is very similar to the “Big daddy Update” from 2005, and consists of changes to the way Google crawls and then indexes sites.

Before Christmas, Google were kind enough to reassure everyone that Caffeine wouldn’t be rolled out until after the festivities. This was a very considerate thing of Google to do, especially as the Christmas period is often the busiest time of year for many businesses.

In November Google told us all about their intentions at PubCon. A few days ago Matt Cutts posted a video of his presentation at this event on his blog. It is well worth watching – if you want to skip ahead to the Caffeine bit though, it starts at around 22.10.

How will Caffeine affect your SEO

If you use white hat SEO techniques, and make sure your site is excellent for the end user (ie people) then you can’t really go wrong. Don’t forget to make sure your content is regularly updated, your coding is clean and tidy, and you link build using ethical and thoughtful techniques you can’t go wrong. The basic rules of SEO still apply!

Yesterday Matt Cutts announced on his blog that the long awaited roll out of caffeine will happen shortly. They will begin by going live at one data centre (or ‘center’ if you’re across the pond!) only, and the full roll out will be after ‘the holidays’ (which I take to mean after Christmas).

Google have been kind enough to wait until after the busiest time of the year for many businesses. This makes me think that the search experience will change more than Matt Cutts lets on. He says “Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.”

So, how can you make sure your listings aren’t going to be a casualty of this roll out?

Well, I would say, go back to basics, make sure the coding of your site is clean, lean and, well… mean. Make sure you offer useful, relevant copy to your potential visitors. Give something back to your online community by participating in social media and social networking, use forums to benefit others (not spam them), even start a blog if you haven’t already.

Unfortunately Google weren’t quite kind enough to leave the caffeine sandbox live so we have no way of testing if any alterations we’ve made to sites in preparation for this roll out have been effective. Like everything else in SEO, it’s just going to have to be a waiting game.

Script

Welcome

We are going to have a look at the Google Caffeine update and see what effect it has on our current listings and to search results.

Google suggests that it is the next generation in architecture for Google’s search and that it aims to improve index speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness.

The progress is all back end and you won’t see the user interface change. They also said that users might not notice a difference in the search engine as the new system will be tested on a single data center and then rolled out slowly over a period of time.

You can test the new search engine at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/.

But we are going to test the search engine with another comparison search engine http://www.comparecaffeine.com/

-Screen Shots-

Comparing the 2 search indexes and testing for some real time searches, so lets start at home and query ‘caffeine’ so if it has improved real time searches we should see some results that are closely related to the Google update ‘caffeine’.

Compare ‘Lockerbie bomber released’ you tube videos not there…

Further examples…

-screen shot ends-

Matt Cutts said that the new indexing architecture will be flexible, powerful and furthermore robust. This sort information doesn’t help much for an SEO as it doesn’t detail what we thought was a step towards a more semantic and real time search and doesn’t give many clues on how it will effect our and our clients businesses.

We have attached some related videos from Web Pro News on the Creare communications blog, which sees Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) questioned about the caffeine update.

Just one last thing worth watching if your an SEO / Webmaster geek, a website called searchenginerapbattle.com which sees what was the major 3 search engines go head to head in a rap battle type showdown.

Thanks for watching.

Resources:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com

http://www.comparecaffeine.com/

Search Engine Rap Battle

http://www.searchenginerapbattle.com/