When Google Caffeine was officially launched this week, the big question for the online community was ‘what has changed’?
Differences between the new update and the existing system are far from obvious. When the announcement was made, Google’s Matt Cutts explained that it wasn’t “about making some UI changes here or there”. Caffeine is an “under the hood” change; the difference lies in the infrastructure of the search engine, and according to Cutts, at this point “even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all”.
Since its launch however, many of the users who were testing it during its sandbox beta period have been blogging about their experiences. Though the information is naturally less than authoritative, they give some insight into how the new infrastructure will change search engine optimisation.
SEObook.com’s Aaron Wall has identified some possible changes to the infrastructure in a blog post;
- Slightly more weight is given to domain names which exactly match the search query.
- less exposure for video and some universal search results
- more support for results based on related words or synonyms
On Mashable.com, Ben Parr confirmed the general consensus that Caffeine offered a faster service than the old Google search engine. His search for ‘Dog’ returned results in 0.12 seconds – twice as fast as the original engine, which returned in 0.25 seconds.
What will interest any SEO company though, is that Parr also suggested that Caffeine placed more emphasis on keywords than the original ranking system. Though results were mostly similar, the caffeine results were slightly more relevant. He warned SEO professionals that “Your job just got a lot harder…[caffeine] has more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results”.
Parr also noted that Google offered more up-to-date results, moving closer to its goal of offering real-time results to all search queries. Comments on Caffeine on Webpronews.com corroborate this, with users indicating that relevant sites are indexed within 2-3 hours. The faster indexing speed means that newly updated pages will rank even higher in the Google ranking.
No related posts.
