In August, Google announced the upcoming roll out of the Google Caffeine infrastructure. Google was quick to point out that they would not launch the new infrastructure until after the Christmas holiday shopping season — giving many online retail stores confidence for the upcoming Christmas shopping season.
In the August announcement, Google described Caffeine this way:
“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences…”
After Thanksgiving, Google said that they had taken Caffeine out of its “sandbox” phase, and that it launched Caffeine on only one of its Data Centers. Search Engine Land was able to confirm that Google had launched Caffeine on the IP address 209.85.225.103, and it was running on this IP address for at least half of its searches. However, the full roll out of Caffeine continues to remain in holding pattern, until after the Christmas season.
Analyzing Google’s Search Engine Result Pages…
Several online publishers and SEO companies jumped into testing the Google Caffeine search results in August, when the original announcement was made public.
The results of testing were somewhat mixed…
- Everyone pretty much agreed that the Caffeine infrastructure was faster than the original Google infrastructure, except for results that included Advanced Search queries, such as when you are using subtraction signs, quotes in query, etc. Mashable suggested that Google Caffeine actually doubled the speed of a Google search.
- Google Caffeine tends to show a larger data set for the number of search results for a particular search.
- The weighting of Video and Universal Search is scaled back in Caffeine.
- A slight value increase to exact match domain names.
- Google seems to be putting a little bit more emphasis on the age of a website.
- An increased weight for domain authority and tag pages on authority websites.
- A substantial increase in weight for social media websites. Currently FriendFeed seems to carry more weight than Twitter or FaceBook.
- Google Caffeine has shown a tendency to put more weight on keyword phrases or keyword strings, as opposed to singular keywords.
- Another major change, which is a reflection of how Google deals with breaking news stories, is that Google is willing to show the title and a description of a page, before it even caches the page in its index.
An interesting change in the Google Search Engine Results that I noted while doing the research for this article is that about half-way down the page, Google has added a real-time element to news items…
What they have done is to load a self-updating Iframe to the search results that shows updated news items on a topic as they become available. The image results are located just under this real-time news block. You can see it now, by doing a quick Google search for Barack Obama.
Also of interest about this real-time news window is that it is actually capturing some of its results from Twitter and other social media websites.
What This Means To Webmasters and SEO Providers…
If you have been relying upon video to push you to the top of Google’s search results, this is no longer a sure-fire method of achieving top search placement quickly.
If you thought that Twitter and other social media websites were worthless to you in Google, then you might start taking a second look.
If you are not getting listings or mentions on authority websites, then you may be missing out on some SEO opportunities.
If you have a keyword-heavy domain name, then your investment may start to help you more going forward.
If you have focused on single keywords and bypassed keyword strings for optimization, you may begin paying heavily for that decision going forward.
Domain age will become more important after Caffeine is fully rolled out, so it is in our best interests to seek links from older websites and to put more emphasis on older sites in our domain portfolios.
Old Google vs New Google Comparisons
Some SEO Providers have noted major changes between the two search engines, although in my own experience, the placement for my target keywords has not suffered, but I have not made major gains either.
In the Old Google, I could put a search result on page one of Google in as little as 15 minutes. I hope that remains unchanged moving forward into the future. Of course my stuff isn’t news, so I will be holding my breath that I can put a web page on page one of Google in only a few minutes — going forward.
The main difference we are going to see going forward is the emphasis on keyword strings as opposed to keywords in the new Google Caffeine roll-out.
If you have been targeting single keywords for your website or the website’s of your clients, be prepared to scramble to overcome your losses in Google’s search rankings… But if you have been targeting those long-tail keywords for any length of time, then you will probably be dancing on the ceiling once Google Caffeine is live across all of its data centers.
In Conclusion…
We have seen a lot of testimony that Google will not change its appearance that much after the Google Caffeine roll-out…
But we have seen enough testimony to expect that some people will be crying rivers of tears, while others will be dancing the jig, after the Google Caffeine launch…
The only thing we can know for sure at this point, is that we really won’t know the impact of Caffeine until after the roll-out as 2010 gets underway.
Trey Pennewell is a writer who has written about SEO and online business for a number of years. He encourages you to learn about and purchase the new SEO ebook titled, “Karma SEO and the Great Search Engine Ranking Dance” at http://www.LinksAndTraffic.com/
Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources
Countdown To Google Page One and Search Engine Optimization Company Nightmares
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Countdown To Google Page One and Search Engine Optimization Company Nightmares
Earlier this month, Google invited the public to take their next generation of web search, code named Caffeine, for a test drive.
The new search infrastructure is the beginning of Google’s advance towards improving indexing speed and scale as the size of the web grows increasingly cumbersome. Google is seeking feedback on the changes from experienced users and web developers by making Caffeine available via a web developer preview.
From the official blog post:
“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences.”
What Is It?
According to Matt Cutts of Google, Caffeine is essentially a rewrite of the search index and it roughly compares with the Big Daddy index of late 2005 / 2006. In other words, it’s a BIG change to Google search.
Here’s a couple of grabs from Mike McDonald’s video interview with Matt Cutts on the subject:
“We’re shooting to get results identical to previous version. We’ll open up a few datacenters with it first and then roll it out.”
“Caffeine will be more powerful, flexible and robust – allowing Google to index faster.”
“(Caffeine) builds a powerful foundation for including any changes we want to do with indexing. Not so much for taking advantage of semantic, real-time indexing, but for getting good
infrastructure in place for growth and unlock more power.”
“Webmasters shouldn’t be concerned. Caffeine does not affect your site architecture”
Something that Matt Cutts hasn’t mentioned but has been discussed amongst my colleagues is whether the Caffeine rollout is at all related to Google’s BigTable technology.
Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data, designed to scale to accommodate huge amounts of data. Google uses BigTable to store data from their various load heavy apps such as Google Earth and Google Finance. It makes sense that this would eventually roll out to search. Perhaps Caffeine is the new algorithmic skin for the BigTable search infrastructure?
Search Technology Testing
In the SEO industry, we’re so used to Google rolling out algorithm changes without fanfare and reacting to them as we realize something has shifted that this announcement came as quite a surprise to me. Paul Carpenter made the same point on the DaveNaylor.co.uk blog:
“… soliciting direct feedback from users before changes are made is something I can’t recall Google embarking on before.”
My first thought was that this was a knee-jerk reaction to the Yahoo / Bing announcement last week. But in his Caffeine blog post, Matt Cutts insists that the announcement had nothing to do with Binghoo and that they’ve had engineers working on it for months. He says that Summer is simply a good time to roll it out for testing.
So I decided to conduct my own test to see if I could notice any changes.
The Experiment
I decided to compare de-caffeinated Google against caffeinated Google using five main benchmarks:
Although denying it has anything to do with the recent launch of Bing, Google’s Matt Cutts unveiled their “secret project”, one of the biggest behind-the-scenes updates to Google search in three years and is now testing the next-generation architecture of web search, called Caffeine.
In fairness to Matt Cutts, he said changes to Google search have been in progress for a number of months and hence, by implication, that the launch of Bing had nothing to do with the development of Caffeine. Moreover, I would hesitate to guess, it has far more to do with speed in real-time, so as to address its place in step with the social networking giants.
Although initially unavailable for testing because of “system maintenance”, Matt Cutts, Google’s enforcer of the Google Webmaster Guidelines and the man who cracked down on link spam, has invited us all to test it. He said Google hasn’t made an update of this magnitude since 2006 and that it will make internet search much faster and more accurate than ever before, although “currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all”.
He went on to say: “The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”
The new architecture is said to include size, indexing, speed, accuracy and ranking changes and Google is asking searchers to give it a try it and report their feedback. While the version is still a pre-beta release at http://www2.sandbox.google.com, you can test the old Google against the new for yourselves at http://www.comparecaffeine.com.
With the surge in popularity of “real-time search” via social networking sites, Google has recognised that search engines have to deliver content at speed. Granted, but there have already been some negative comments, although I don’t wholeheartedly agree with them. According to marketingpilgrim.com, “…Google’s attempts to include more social media “real time” results, it turned the dial to 11, when 7 would have worked just fine. Another clue that Caffeine is focused on speed – perhaps at the sacrifice of relevancy – is there appears to be more ‘Similar’ only and less ‘Cached’ results.” Personally, I have only seen a shift in relevancy, not sacrifice.
So how does all this compare? According to tests at mashable.com, the new search was “lightning fast” double the speed. Next, they tried accuracy. They commented that: “Both sets are very accurate, but subjectively, the set displayed by the new Google search more accurately reflect what a user would be looking for.” Then followed a test of temporal relevancy, or how breaking news was returned. The answer: “about the same”.
Their conclusion was that Caffeine is:
- very fast and it often doubled the speed of the old Google;
- it relies more on keywords and;
- it places “more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results”.
“Clearly,” they wrote, “a priority for Google and Bing…with both Twitter and Facebook launching real-time search engines, they needed to respond.”
So, I tried out my own website and that of my partner’s. Maybe the caffeine hit kicked in somewhere along the line, as he has gone from #4 to #2 and I have gone from #3 to #1, which all sounds perfectly satisfactory to me. The reason I mention this is that both of these sites have been involved in article writing, social media, blogging and RSS for about three years, and I thought it about time a new infrastructure gave us some more weight for following the “rulebook”.
But not to be deterred in my research, I looked up many search terms, most of which returned similar results. However, one interesting oddity was to look up “search engine” to compare results of the old against the new. The figures weren’t too different in volume, at 246m against 243m, but with one surprising omission in the new: Bing does not feature on the first page of results. Oops!
Most site owners have been happy with Google’s results, with one notable exception: I read a piece by the Guardian in which a British husband and wife team have been waging a three-year battle to get their price comparison website recognised by Google. So I searched on “Search and compare prices”, the first part of their search string. Nothing much on the old Google, but Caffeine has elevated them to eighth position. Good news for their business. And goodbye lawyers?
In final conclusion, then, the update to the infrastructure seems to include:
- increased weight on authority domains and social media sites;
- slightly more weight on domain names (a practice I don’t favour);
- better use of linkage between keywords and phrases;
- less weight given to video.
To my mind, if you have followed the rules and what has been said in the SEO forums and articles over the past couple of years, Google’s Caffeine update has retuned forthcoming search results to be more in keeping with what they have for a long time recommended – and for those of us who have been doing so it offers us little more than a mild stimulus, as in Matt Cutt’s own words, “…most users won’t notice a difference”.
John Sylvester is the media director of V9 Design & Build (http://www.v9designbuild.com), a company specialising in web design in Bangkok, and who is an expert in search engine optimization and web marketing strategies.
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%%Caffeine, Google’s Mild Stimulus%%