Google Caffeine: Providing new Ways for Search Engine Optimization
Posted by on June 26th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in SEO - Search Engine Optimization |
Through the years, search engine optimization has always been a very lucrative (albeit technical) business. With the influence and reach that the Internet today provides, businesses and their corresponding web developer have found the call of link building even harder to ignore.
Google, one of the major players in the SEO realm, has constantly been on the development process to make sure that they keep their rankings as accurate as possible. They have also increasingly tracked down websites and meticulously inspected them to keep the sanctity of their search results pages.
Get Excited with Google’s Caffeine
Google’s latest invention is aimed at furthering the cause of accurate search engine optimization. Released early in 2010, Google Caffeine is intended to fix the glitches and holes that many web developers have learned to exploit over time.
It tracks down sites that are utilizing misleading reciprocal links in order to get ahead of the competition. This tactic results in them having surging ahead of those who painstakingly labor through the process of natural link building.
The release of Google Caffeine does not discredit those websites that employ paid and reciprocal link building. Not at all! Caffeine is intended to clean up the SEO mess brought about by too much bad and spam links. Caffeine aims to reward those who work hard in their link building processes and penalize those who cheat in their processes.
Technical Details about Google Caffeine
Back in November of 2009, Matt Cutts, a Google engineer working for the company’s Search Quality Group, said that Google will be introducing Google Caffeine in a gradual pace. This resulted in many web developers having no idea when Caffeine would be fully implemented at that time.
Caffeine is basically a newer and much improved version of the Google search engine. Its algorithms differ to those of the older versions because it is intended to provide a faster and more comprehensive search engine results to its users. Google caffeine relies more on keyword phrases rather than the traditional keywords to provide searchers with more comprehensive results and options that would make the users searching easier.
Also with Google Caffeine, real-time search results are suddenly pushed into the limelight. This development from Google gives more attention, not only to the relevancy posted by a website, but also as important is the freshness of the content posted.
With Google Caffeine, latest results would include updates from social networking sites or recently published articles about the topic being searched for. Taking advantage of Google Caffeine would now mean that you not only post relevant content but also post content that are up to date and fresh.
Here are some of the basic things web developers may want to know about Google Caffeine:
1. Speed matters, always
With the older version of Google, speed is not necessarily a major part of the SEO equation. On the other hand, Caffeine places relevant consideration to page speed or how fast a website can load up for their visitors. This has been a baffling development for many web developers since how fast a page loads would mean upgrading their servers to be able to hasten up their loading process.
Also, page speed depends on a variety of factors, some of which the web developer has no control over. This includes factors such as CSS, HTML Content, JavaScript, domain hosting, usage of images, graphics, and other files.
With speed being a relevant factor to a page’s search engine rankings, many website owners and developers have began to take action and upgrade their systems to ensure faster web page loading and higher rankings for their sites.
2. Think domain authority
A particular domain possesses a certain authority that search engine crawlers take into consideration when determining the ranking of your website. In Google Caffeine, this factor takes an even more important role in page rankings besides the quantity of incoming links or the former page rankings of your website.
Factors to consider when choosing domains for your site would include exact-matching domain names and significant amounts of anchor texts from diverse domains. Websites featuring all these would sometimes trump in the SERPs known authority websites such as Wikipedia, Amazon or BBC.
3. Expanded search results
With Google Caffeine, popular social networking sites are now given as much importance as regular blogs and web pages. Google Caffeine shows results coming from websites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and others, a significant change from the older Google version where updates from these websites are not really given prime consideration.
4. Domain age or longevity of domain existence
Since the SEO and SERP game is all about establishment and authority, brand new domains would have to wait their turn and build up their reputations first before they actually move up the search engine rankings. Especially with the new Google Caffeine, brand new domains would have a harder time being on top since this new development takes into consideration the time with which the domain of a certain website has existed. Already established domain names have the advantage here over the newly-made ones.
5. Domains that have exact matching names
Though a very simple factor, this is the one often ignored by many web developers. Having an exact matching domain name will make it easier for your website to be found by search engine crawlers. For example, having the domain name Financialconsultants.com will almost always shoot this website up the SERPs when visitors search for “financial consultants”. Take this into consideration the next time you plan on building a new website.
6. Google Caffeine now returns increased results
Due to the faster time with which crawlers can find and index websites, Google Caffeine has the ability to return and index a larger number of website per search.
7. Relevant Content always matters
Despite all of these other considerations, nothing is still as important as relevant content. Google may have tweaked a bit on their search algorithms in order to accommodate to this host of other factors, relevant content will still be the most important factor among them all.
Without relevant, fresh, and unique articles or posts in our website, despite all the upgrades you may have made, search engine crawlers would just bypass your website or worse even put it in a bad light. Outstanding content attracts search engine crawlers more than fancy upgrades or domain names. You can do all the upgrades that you want but always remember the bottom line of the whole search engine optimization process: CONTENT IS ALWAYS KING!
Taking Full Advantage of Google Caffeine
With real-time search results in the equation, web developers should take note that posting fresh and unique content is important in generating enough traffic and links back to their sites. Strategy is important here. Since it’s real time, web developers can take advantage of this by posting content just in time and in sync with the trending topics among search engines.
Aside from continually posting relevant content for Google Caffeine to see, web developers can also upgrade their servers to be more in line with Caffeine’s new criteria of fast browser loading. These updated search engine spiders do not like to wait for domains to load so they can search them. Almost always, they will ignore these and go to another faster website. This will not bode well with your SERP process.
All in all, the key to maximizing Google Caffeine and make sure you keep you rankings on the positive side is to always be an authority source, relevant and reputable. Provide great content. Content should be information rich and helpful to your visitors. Do this and the good search engine rankings will eventually come.
