Should Google "Caffeine" be Giving You Jitters?

Should Google's new "Caffeine" technology be keeping YOU up at night?

Hey Stompers,

As you may have heard, Google recently announced testing of a new, more powerful version of their search engine technology.

It’s code-named “Caffeine” and you can read about from Google’s own Dev Blog here.

Now, as business people who rely on SEO, any time Google gives us some insights into what they have planned for the future, we need to pay attention.

So what can we learn from what Google is telling us about the future of search?  Here’s a quote I think is particularly telling:

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

I think that one sentence tells us all we need to know about where we need to be moving, and here’s how:

1. Size and Indexing Speed: This tells us that Google is going to be crawling more pages and indexing them FASTER.  This continues Google’s focus on fresh content – so many new pages are created every day, they can’t keep up.

2. Accuracy: This indicates that the sites that will continue to “win” the search game are going to be the ones that can correctly match up the searcher’s keywords with the content they were actually looking for.  Google indicates that they’re interested not only in what sites people click on, but what the searcher’s behavior is once they arrive.

With that in mind, success will come from testing and adjusting your pages to better serve your visitors.  It will no longer be enough to focus on the keywords alone, but on actually making your content relevant to what those searchers want.

One way to do this is through careful organization of your site structure, organizing information in ways that people will find useful, not just search spiders.

3. Comprehensiveness: To me, this indicates that Google will continue to heap love upon “authority” sites – ones that do a really good job of completely covering their selected niche.

In Google’s never-ending quest for relevance, Google wants to see sites that can indicate a thorough and comprehensive resource for what people are searching for.  This is why it’s important to continue to build pages that rank for ALL your relevant keywords.

It’s not just about the individual SERPS, but the “profile” that a comprehensive site creates.  I can imagine that this focus could be partly to combat “SERP Spamming” tactics where results are flooded with multiple, largely identical copies of the same information spread across multiple Web 2.0 sites.

More and more, it’s going to be important to create sites with larger and larger collections of content in order to really dominate the listings.

Once again, Google shows that they prefer larger, older sites that are packed with useful information.

So even though there’s been a lot of buzz around this announcement and lots of speculation, I don’t think you need to change too much if you’re already doing your SEO the StomperNet way.  What’s working in Google now for us appears to be exactly what they want to encourage.  In fact, they want MORE of it, FASTER.

So get started today, so by the time Caffeine comes out of BETA, you’ll be so far ahead of your competition they may never be able to catch up.

Here’s Hoping, and Keep Stomping!

Brad Fallon
CEO
StomperNet.com