> BlogIn June 2010, Google officially announced its new search index – Caffeine. After months of planning, this innovative and forward thinking search engine has released an update which aims to give searchers real time results, faster and in a range of formats including video, images, social media and news. As Google’s Webmaster Central Blog announced: “Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it's the largest collection of web content we've offered”. The new search index is based around fundamental changes to its infrastructure, indexing and speed. Many have also speculated that it is in response to increasing competition from its search rival, Bing.
The web encompasses an enormous and ever-increasing spectrum of content. Back in May this year, we were presented with the new and improved Google Search Interface. A combination of several new technologies rolled into one, the new interface included a new left-hand navigation where users could switch between the various search verticals (images, videos, blogs, maps, news, shopping, books and discussions) as they carried out a particular search.
Caffeine now shows us more holistic search results, dependant on a particular search. As an example, let’s look at a recent popular news topic, the rescue of the Chilean miners. My search returns the latest news results (38 minutes ago), relevant news websites, images and videos related to the ‘Chile miners’.
As always, having a website with meaningful, unique and relevant content that enhances a user’s search experience, and that the search engines can easily crawl and index is paramount. Caffeine appears to be placing even more energy into devaluing ‘dodgy, unnatural’ link building practices such as link farming, and websites that contain conflicting information, that have been created to pull search query traffic but lack the relevant content the users seek.
In terms of what Caffeine will be focusing more on when crawling and indexing websites, the main areas include: freshness and regularity of new content, page download times, quality and relevance of content, traffic, bounce rates and social media interaction, among a host of other factors.
While not all website owners update their content on a regular basis, there are ways to generate fresh and regular content, and thus frequency of visits from the Google Searchbots, such as: blog posts, press releases, video posts and social media interaction on the popular social sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Additionally, part of the faster and efficient page crawling and indexing of content on your site by Google, is the importance of correctly tagging content such as images, video and blog posts.
If you have an effective search engine marketing strategy in place already, there won’t be any major cause for alarm; you may just notice an improvement in the number of pages being indexed and quickness of new content being picked up in the search results, which may bring you even more targeted traffic.
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