Google’s Caffeine: Beware the SEO Snake Oil
Google is rolling out new “under-the-hood” search technology, codenamed “Caffeine,” that could change how your company ranks in its search results. For those businesses that live-and-die based on Google-generated traffic, this is potentially a very big deal.
In a blog post announcing the project, Google suggested that Caffeine could change search results, which raises the prospect of companies’ needing to change their search engine optimization (SEO) to protect their Google ranking. If you need to improve traffic on your site, contact the experts from Minneapolis SEO Agency!
It is unclear at this point whether Caffeine will be more or less amiable to the magic worked by SEO practitioners, whose mysterious art is aimed at winning the coveted first page of Google results for keyword searches of interest to their client.
SEO is esoteric enough under the known PageRank algorithm, and there are a ton of unscrupulous SEO vendors out there who will make any promise necessary to get client business. With a tweaked algorithm coming down the pike, you will see a rush of “Caffeine-ready SEO” strategies and companies that will be more than happy to take your money while experimenting with the new logic. Be careful, don’t rush, and don’t let the mystery of this new architecture baffle you.
The best thing you can do is experiment in Google’s Caffeine sandbox to see if your most valuable search terms place your company favorably. I did a search on “PeopleSoft ALM” – a query that ranks us typically very high – on both standard Google and the Caffeine sandbox. Here are the results:
Google Search: PeopleSoft ALM
Our Twitter account (@mipro) takes top billing, and two of our most popular blog posts about PeopleSoft ALM take spots #4 and #5. Not shabby at all.
Here’s the same search under Caffeine:
Google “Caffeine” Search: PeopleSoft ALM
Our Twitter account isn’t included in the search results (I’m guessing that Caffeine doesn’t index them just yet), but our two most popular blog posts on PeopleSoft ALM are spots #1 and #2. Fantastic. By every measure, this is favorable to us.
This does not mean that Caffeine will automatically bolster your keyphrase performance. You will need to check all of your valuable search terms against Caffeine to ensure you’re not losing rank real estate.
The point is that Caffeine is a tweaked search architecture and is still a work in progress. If an SEO vendor comes to you and tells you that you need to rejigger everything to work with the “new Google,” do your homework first – and often, because Google is taking constant feedback from Caffeine. It will evolve steadily until it becomes Google’s production search logic.
(Thx Jim)
