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.

In a recent video, Matt Cutts talks about ‘Sock Puppet Marketing’, and how this is bad practice for SEO. For the uninitiated ‘Sock Puppet Marketing’ is where somebody creates multiple profiles in forums, social media sites etc to fake conversations about products or services. This is bad because you are basically lying about the product, Matt Cutts points out that if the product or service isn’t good (or bad) enough to create natural, viral hype then you shouldn’t be faking it.

Watch the Video, apart from anything else, Matt Cutt’s voices are excellent and made me chuckle!

On the serious side, by partaking in sock puppet marketing, you will begin to devalue the natural links that can be created in this way, by honest people who genuinely love a product enough to tweet, answer questions on forums or blog comment about it in a positive way. It is, in my opinion a terrible shame (though inevitable) that these links are devalued. The fact that Mr Cutts has thought this a considerable enough problem for him to create a video dedicated to the subject makes me think that Google at least, has already begun to devalue this kind of link.

I would suggest that it would be a largely pointless exercise to start this kind of campaign. The links you create will be obsolete an a short time, so why bother? Surely, as Matt Cutts says, creating useful and informative content for your users would be a much more valuable use of your time. Though, maybe not as fun as creating multiple personalities for yourself!

In a recent video posted on You Tube (see above or click here), Matt Cutts talks about how Google prioritise the thousands of spam reports submitted every day. It stands to reason the explanation that they do order complaints, and again it seem plain common sense to me that the first question they ask is “What’s the impact on their users?” – after all Google is all about their users.

Matt Cutts says that if a spam complaint is about a website that a lot of their users will visit and see then this complaint will take priority over a complaint made about a smaller site with less visitors. With so many spam reports every day, Google would surely be overwhelmed if they dealt with each one on a ‘first come – first served’ basis. Though this is a further example of Google putting larger sites, and larger brands before small business sites, but again you can see it from Google’s point of view, with so many spam sites out there it makes sense that they prioritise known and trusted brands in an attempt to protect their users. It’s another case of the spammers spoiling things for the rest of us. Spam reports of lesser importance get prioritised to the next wave of algorithms and how the algorithms should tackle spammy activities.

Matt Cutts goes on to say that they do look at ‘a ton’ of spam complaints and also take action on ‘a ton’ of complaints. The complaints that they take manual action on they try and think, “How can we best use our resources?” a further example of Google looking at issues that would most affect their users.

This is particularly pertinent to us, here at Creare because coincidentally we had to submit a spam report ourselves only yesterday. A competitor of one of our clients had basically copied the meta description of their homepage – now, we know this probably won’t make any difference to our client’s site as their meta description was indexed first, but we still felt compelled to submit a spam report. The competitor of our client didn’t even change the company name in the meta description, which is just plain idiotic!

This example of our client’s competitor is an example of people trying to ‘do SEO’ – you need to know what you’re doing. You need to be aware of the pitfalls – because I bet that our client’s competitor didn’t know they were doing anything wrong (though how anyone can think plagiarism is OK is completely beyond me), they’ve either read somewhere that meta descriptions help SEO, or they’ve employed one of the many cowboy SEO companies springing up all over the world, offering SEO for peanuts (pay peanuts, get monkeys – right?).

My advice for anyone who wants SEO on their website is to employ a reputable company. Check their listings for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ if they’re nowhere to be found the chances are, that they’re not very good, so not worth employing.