A Shot of Caffeine

Recently, Google announced the completion of a small but significant "under the hood" shake up of their web indexing systems. This latest update, named 'Caffeine', has been engineered to help cope with the boom in online content, thanks in part to the increased prevalence of blogs, real time news and social media. Caffeine aims to improve Google's search indexing by producing more accurate, up-to-date search results that reflect the different types of rich media that are continually producing new content.

When Google returns results from a search query, it's not returning live results - it's returning a cache or latest index of results. With Caffeine, the indexing is updated more regularly, in smaller portions, and from a wider variety of sources - Caffeine aims to incorporate content such as pictures, video, news, blogs and real time updates in its indexing, with newly published content available much faster.

Google believes that Caffeine is a foundation that "...makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results... ".

So what does the completion and launch of Caffeine mean for users, SEOs and website owners that aren't necessarily interested in the exact "under the hood" algorithm tinkering? Let's take a look.

The Need for Speed

Speed is one factor now affecting the indexing and results by Google. If you keep track of your ranking on Google's search engine results pages, you may have already begun to notice changes that have occurred since the launch of Caffeine. This may be due to the fact that Google has now started to factor in site speed - basically, the faster your website loads the better. If your web pages are taking longer to load, then you could be penalised, and ultimate you could lose ranking. But don't panic - Google's Matt Cutts has said that this move will affect less than 1% of search queries.

Quality, Real-Time Content is King

The saying 'content is king' has been banded about for years, and is still as relevant as ever as far as Google is concerned. However, the times they are a-changin' (somewhat), in that Caffeine update not only values unique, relevant and original content, but is also capable of processing and indexing much more of it. And with real-time results being picked up faster and more widely than ever before, publishing new, relevant content is a major consideration when it comes to Page Ranking and search engine results pages.

In fact, with Caffeine, there's a real emphasis on and leverage with real-time web results, so utilising and publishing unique and interesting content to this medium (think Facebook and Twitter, just as a starting point) is crucial.

Want to find out more about Caffeine? Click here ( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html).