Google Caffeine – What Exactly Is Google Caffeine?
It has been over a month since the official release of Google’s new web indexing system – Caffeine – but it seems that not everyone has fully understood what it is that Google Caffeine actually does and how it affects their businesses and websites.
So what does Google Caffeine do?
Essentially it is a new way of indexing the information on the web to provide more current results, with Caffeine the web user has access to new information much sooner after it was published – which is great news for people who run a blog on their site or use news stories within their website. If you take a look at this graphic that Google themselves provided you can see that the old indexing system consisted of several layers:
The main layer within the old index would update roughly every two weeks – but to update another layer meant that the entire Internet had to be looked at again before new content would be available. With the new Caffeine indexing system google can look at smaller parts of the web – which leads to faster indexing and content being available to the user at a much faster rate.
“As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.” Official Google Blog
So Caffeine provides fresh content, quickly and has been designed to move with the Internet as it blossoms and grows with more emphasis on video, images, news and real-time content.
How will Caffeine affect my site?
This is where the confusion started to come in – Caffeine was released around the the time of the Mayday Update and people seem have got a little confused between the two. Whilst the Mayday update was change to the algorithm, Caffeine was only a change to the indexing system. Caffeine in itself should not adversely affect your rankings but there are a few points to take into consideration:
- With faster indexing any SEO changes you make to your site should be discovered quicker by Google
- Caffeine’s use of real time web means you will be able to utilise social media in your Internet Marketing campaigns (particularly Twitter and Facebook)
- Quality content will now be more important than ever
- The speed of your site now matters – make sure your hosting company aren’t doing you a disservice
Hopefully we have answered some of the question surrounding the confusion of what Google caffeine is and how it will affect your site.
Some useful SEO tools:
Web Page Analyser – a free tool for web site speed testing
Page size Extractor – a tool for checking the overall size of a webpage, including content and images.
+++Wayne Barker+++
July 29th, 2010 at 7:14 pm
Don’t you think that infographic looks like one of those drawings from a school text book showing how atoms and protons and other science stuff works?
“Atomic Caffeine”
Or maybe one of those human size hamster-balls that you can run around in at summer festivals.
“Hamster Google”
It has to be one of the worst infographics ever
July 30th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Atomic Google – I love it!
Don’t you think it has a retro charm, infographics as designed by the makers of The Jetsons??
July 30th, 2010 at 9:40 am
Atomic Google has sinister undertones, it kind of suggests that Google may be taking over the world!
Maybe I should investigate the ‘worst ever infographics’ and write a post.
Maybe this is a better Caffeine Infographic!
July 30th, 2010 at 1:06 pm
Is it more of an emotigraphic? Gives a feel for what the change is about without explaining any actual information.
(Thought I’d just invented the word emotigraphic but a quick Google shows one result – on Google’s news about patents – ah well, can’t be original every time).
July 30th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
I must say I quite like the idea of an ‘emotigraphic’ and ‘feeling ideas’. However I am still not sure that the graphic conveys the complexity of the new indexing system.
That is unimportant though – based on the fact that you invented a word that only a great mind at Google seems to have come up with! Thanks for the comment Francine!