Google “Caffeine”
Google is already in the process of launching their most recent algorithm change dubbed “caffeine”. Whether you knew about this or not, clearly as a site owner we thought you might have some questions and we also would like to correlate some information to you as well.
Google hopes this new algorithm change will provide faster, more accurate, more up-to-date, and just plain more results which quite frankly has and always will be their end goal. Google plans to accomplish this by better indexing the web as a whole, but also RSS feeds and social media postings such as Twitter and Facebook. Regardless of Google’s intentions, we care where our clients will stand in the new search results. At this time, all signs point to relatively little change including our preliminary tests on Google’s test “caffeine” search engine. Although we cannot say with certainty to what degree the changes will weigh in comparison with older metrics, we know from both Google and analysis on our part what has changed or has been added too as being considered more relevant. Most importantly and interestingly are the following (in no particular order):
• Content, both fresh and relevant
• Site speed
• Social media
• Outbound links
So great, we know of some of the big changes but how does this relate to us?
Content is King! We’ve been saying this and Google has been saying it and now more than ever both the freshness and relevancy of it becomes more crucial, especially the freshness. This means it’s crucial to have a blog associated with your site and to update it frequently. We honestly cannot stress this enough… update your blog frequently or have us do it for you! Also, make sure the posts are relevant to your product or similar items within your realm. If you sell makeup, its fine to talk about your product but also don’t be afraid to mention stars wearing makeup and linking to that page; which is an outbound link and will be discussed further below.
The slow and steady wins the race, except when it comes to search results! We now know that site loading time is relevant, but how much so remains to be seen. At this point it appears that Google is mainly concerned about very slow loading sites providing a poor user experience and therefore being less relevant. As long as your site doesn’t load very slowly at this point, you should be fine, but consider some coding optimization as user anticipated load times will only be expected to decrease in the future as more and more users get access to faster broadband speeds.
We’re social creatures indeed! We’ve already seen the social media revolution unveiling before our eyes for quite some time and it seems Google has deemed it relevant enough to include it in its search results for certain items. This affects you in that your Twitter posts (tweets) may rank higher than your organic results in certain scenarios and in certain occasions. More than ever, it’s important to have a Facebook and Twitter account that you update frequently with your relevant keywords.
Sharing is caring! In the past, SEO focused on trying to get as many inbounds links coming to your site, and the higher quality the better. It was common practice to do link exchanges and then “secretly” kill the partner’s links so all the SEO “juice” flowed in, yet none flowed out. Now it’s a bit different. It’s ok to point to another site so long as its credible and related to you, in fact its shined upon a little bit. So no longer do you need to fear linking out, rather feel liberated to utilize the web the way it was meant to be by periodically pointing out to high quality and high ranking content. Note that this should be used only when you feel you have content that really would help your clients and do this linking from mainly your blog.
In the end, SEO is a tricky business that is a game of cat and mouse. Google has had several major revisions of their algorithm over the past decade that has decimated rankings, only to be tweaked further to clear up issues, but this revision looks to be different despite being heavily worked on under the hood. We hope this clears up some concerns or questions you may have and as always, contact your account managers with any questions that may remain and we will do our best to help!
