The Google Caffeine Update

Much has been made of Google’s recent “Caffeine” update in the world of webmasters and search engine marketing professionals. Over the past month it has been the subject of discussion in search marketing forums on the internet, and now even clients are starting to ask me what exactly the Google Caffeine update is. I have therefore decided to dedicate a blog post to the subject. It is definitely not the only one on the internet, but I’ll be giving my perspective on how this update will affect things in this arena.

First, what is the Google Caffeine update? Well, there’s nowhere better to get it than from the horse’s mouth. Here’s what Google had to say on the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

As stated by Google, the changes being introduced not related to the user interface, but more to the inner workings and infrastructure that drives the search engine’s crawling and indexing of web content. Google is soliciting feedback from webmasters, and you can find the “new Google” at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/. You can also compare the current version to the new version at CompareCaffeine.com, which give a sense of the difference between both versions.

Now the question is, how will search rankings be affected by this overhaul to Google’s system? Here are a few points that I have noted from research and testing out of Google Caffeine:

• It seems that this overhaul will mean that results are generated faster. Here’s a test I conducted on the search term, “Dallas Cowboys Stadium”

"Old Google"


"Google Caffeine"




As you can see, there is a considerable difference in speed with Google Caffeine.

• There is also a noticeable difference between the way that Universal Search results are displayed for queries. This may temporary as Google completely make the change, but is worth noting.

• There is greater emphasis on making results as current as possible. Mashable recently conducted a test on Google Caffeine and claims that in some instances; it “seems more capable of producing real-time results”. This would certainly make sense as Google is facing increased competition from Twitter, Facebook and a revitalized MSN search (Bing).

As far as rankings are concerned, there does not seem to be a big difference in site rankings overall. And for those who want to know how this change is going to affect your business, my view is if you were already doing SEO the right way, you’ve got nothing to worry about. At the end of the day, relevance will always be king, and SEO professionals that focus on this and execute effectively will be successful.