Perks of an Algorithm Update

Caffeine, Google’s new web indexing system, has been the talk of the SEO world for some time.  Google began sandbox testing nearly a year ago, and blogs have been speculating about how this will affect SEO and SEM ever since.  This week it’s official, and Google’s Matt Cutts has given us the rundown of the algorithm changes and what it can really do.

Google’s old algorithm would take around two weeks to index a site, while Caffeine gets the job done in minutes.  To test out Caffeine’s speediness, I4U News made up a gibberish word, and included it in the title of a post.  That new word, “cyberreblaus,” was indexed in a little over a minute, and speed that was previously impossible to achieve.

Redefining Relevance

While Google was built on a foundation of relevant search results, the factors that determine relevance have shifted as Internet usage has evolved. With Caffeine, Google recognizes that “relevant” also means up-to-date. According to Google, Caffeine offers 50 percent “fresher” results, which translates to more timely updates from news sources and credible bloggers.

With the advent of constantly updating sites like Twitter, Internet users have become accustomed to a real time flow of information. Caffeine is an attempt to bridge the gap between what is traditionally relevant or authoritative and timely results.

Google search results are drawn from over 100 million gigabytes of storage – the largest collection of web content ever offered.  Before the Caffeine update, web searches pulled data from the most recent Google index of every site deemed relevant.  With Caffeine, that information is seconds old, not days or weeks.

The old Google index updated information one layer at a time, analyzing the entire web before any single layer could be updated.  Think of this as Google running a lap around the entire Web before updating its results. Caffeine takes a radically different approach, with spiders analyzing the web in smaller chunks and updating as they go, bringing the Internet closer to real time than ever before.

With all layers being updated simultaneously, users can find new content that was published seconds ago rather than days ago.  From the user’s perspective, this amazing leap forward in indexing and retrieval means users can pull up the most timely news stories with any query.

Focusing on Fresh Content

Google’s new indexing algorithm comes down to one lesson for websites: fresh content is now more important than ever.  Google already placed an emphasis on timely information, but it’s now become the focal point of the search engine.  In this sense, Google will reward more aggressive SEO tactics for continuous updates on the Web. This puts enormous pressure on websites to increase the flow of original content.

Uploading a new blog every other week or once a month used to supply Google with enough new content to keep your site bobbing along in the middle of the pack, but not anymore.  Web publishers are going to have to start paying much more attention to the way Google views output on the Web, because Caffeine’s spiders will move on within a few seconds of arriving at a site if the information is not deemed fresh enough.

RSS Wrinkle

Another interesting aspect of the index overhaul is that right around the same time Google first announced Caffeine, they also introduced an open-source RSS technology called PubSubHubbub, or PuSH.  This new RSS technology brings RSS feeds closer to real time, so when a blog or website with an RSS feed publishes something, that update reaches subscribers within seconds.

Inspired by how we work with and use the Internet, Google is constantly pushing the boundaries on how the Internet works with us. With Caffeine’s innovations in crawling and indexing, the Google Dance is a thing of the past. While it’s always great news when Google revolutionizes the way we interact with the Internet and the way it interacts with us, every change comes with a new set of rules and requirements.  Keeping up with Google is the fun part.  Making sure Google doesn’t pass you by is where the work begins.