The impact of the latest Google Caffeine changes

On June 8, 2010, Google officially completed development of its new “Caffeine” indexing algorithm.  Many marketers were left wondering, “How does this impact me?”  Well, I’ve done a fair bit of research and here’s what I’ve come up with…

• 50% fresher results – Google actually says “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.”  So that sounds like they’re now indexing more pages than ever, which means more competition.   Not good!
• Less chance of dominating Page 1 – Now, more than ever, Site Authority plays an important part in rankings.  So if you previously had your main site, plus a Squidoo lens, plus a bunch of articles showing up on Page 1, there’s a good chance you’ll no longer have such a smattering of listings.  Chances are that some of the big players like Amazon, About, Wikipedia, etc have taken over your spots.

So what methods should a marketer use in this “new world” so that Caffeine has more love for you?

• Use old domains (obviously this is easier said than done…but if you have the chance take it…)
• Backlink inner pages too (not only the home page) – Google now sees each page as its own entity moreso than before.  So just because your home page has a ton of backlinks no longer means that link juice will automatically flow through to your inner pages.
• Regularly add fresh content (which is preferably unique).

My thoughts

I’ve noticed many, shitty, 1-page, “Made For Adsense” sites drop in rankings after the latest Caffeine updates.  My take on this?  Great!

It’s embarrassing to be an internet marketer when it seems like the vast majority of our kind serves no purpose other than to flood the interwebs with useless spam.  So if Caffeine means the public will see less of this crap and more useful search results, then I’m all for it.