It is not every day that Google, makes dramatic changes its algorithm, so when Google started soliciting feedback last week for “Caffeine”, our SEO team took notice. In fact, according to Matt Cutts, principal engineer at Google, it’s been more than 3 years since the last major change. Although it is too early to start changing our process as launch is weeks away, but the changes we are seeing are addressing a lack of timeliness in the Google results, which has been a major deficiency. So for instance, if a plane crash happens today, the Google results won’t reflect that until the news outlets pick up on it. With the new algorithm, if it’s being talked about in social media (i.e. Twitter) then Google will start picking up those results in real time.
Google caffeine is still in Beta, but this is what we are seeing so far:
- More weight given to authoritative domains and to tag pages like Technorati and Facebook
- Tuning down the exposure on some video and universal search results
- An emphasis on real time indexing. We are going to see more twitter results and other social media sites, especially on news related queries
- The results are showing up faster, for now
- perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms
If you want to test Google Caffeine for yourself, try it out here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ or compare the results from old to new here: http://www.comparecaffeine.com/
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