The advent ofGoogle Caffeinewill see Google's
technical infrastructure undergoing a massive change, the biggest
one since Big Daddy in December 2005, and if you're not prepared
for it, your site will sink down the search engine
rankings.
Matt Cutts, head of
Google's webspam team, explains this update: "Caffeine is a
fundamental re-architecting of how our indexing system works." Now
after two years of development
Google Caffeine has
gone public.
Google are making sure the roll out is not disruptive as they
don't want a repeat of the public relations disaster of the Big
Daddy update, where the indexes were in flux for a couple of months
during peak shopping season Christmas 2005.
In short, as a result of lessons learned from that incident, you
and I won't really see much of an immediate change in search engine
ranking positions.
So if the results are not different, then why the fuss? Being an
infrastructural upgrade, it allows Google to process more data more
efficiently. This means more signals can be incorporated within the
search algorithm and so it can move closer to generating what it
thinks is the perfect search index.
As we know, search engine optimisation (SEO) is about making a
site friendly to search engines and exploiting their weaknesses.
However, with a profound shift to a far more intelligent
Google search engine it will be really hard to break open these
weaknesses and game your way to the top of the rankings.
Today we can pay our way to the top through good site
optimisation, careful link buying and online PR. Tomorrow, the only
way businesses will have prominence on Google will be via Pay Per
Click Adwords (PPC), demand from end users, clever social
engineering or luck.
As fas as PPC is concerned, Betfair PPC expert Kemley Sellars,
believes Caffeine will allow Google to make niche phrases on its
index more relevant and thus more profitable for both Google and
the businesses advertising. He sees a broader distribution of spend
across the search index, allowing more advertisers to profitably
work with Google.
Generally users are not interested in commercial offerings,
unless they are actively seeking this information and are in buying
mode. So for Google to filter relatively irrelevant commercial
listings from non commercial indexes is good for the user and good
for Google since it will motivate businesses to spend on PPC around
more commercial phrases.
With organic search, businesses looking to generate revenue
online will need to think hard about building websites users care
about. Unless you want to face potential exclusion from Google, you
will not be able to fake solid indicators like click through
volumes to your site from the search results.
So the answer lies in ensuring your website is useful to your
users, or doing some clever social engineering to make sure your
website looks like it is useful for users.
I think links will still be valuable for SEO, but Google will
rely more on signals you can't fake. In the end there may be only
one choice... to build a great website. I know this will be a tough
call for lots of businesses.
In any case a profound change is coming, so get ready.
Nick Garner is SEO and Social Media manager at Betfair. He
blogs atNewRedBookand can be followed ontwitter.