subject: Can Google Caffeine shake up the SEO World? [print this page] Can Google Caffeine shake up the SEO World?
In bloody battles between search engines Google has always come out as a winner. To hold its position of a preeminent leader it is constantly striving to introduce new technologies, innovational features and services. And now this mammoth search engine is rocking the cyberspace with its new system of indexing.
Innovatively new indexing system was called Caffeine. Its name, as rumour has it, comes from a couple of coffee addicted developers, who were pulling an all-nighter sweating over their brainchild. Caffeine is not another regular Google update. It's more like drastic reengineering of the whole indexing architecture and infrastructure of this search engine. All these changes are aimed to improve searching process, provide users with more up-to-date search results and the largest selection of web content ever offered. So what is the way the new indexing system works?
Before Caffeine was introduced Google had scanned the information in layers. Some layers got indexed faster, some patiently waited for their turn for weeks. That system proved to be ineffective, mainly because of the long delays between the time the content was published and the time it got indexed. Besides web content itself is getting more and more complex: flash, images, video and real-time updates have become an integral part of webpages, which made an average webpage more complicated for search engines to analyze and index.
The new Google's algorithm makes this analysis a lot faster, since it breaks the data in chunks and runs search engine updates non-stop on a global scale. That lets users get the information about new content quicker than ever before, regardless of the time and the place it was published.
That sounds like big pros with little cons, but that change has raised lots of worries among businessmen, who run their business on-line. The point is that with the advent of Caffeine page rankings (the order in which pages appear on Google after users enter particular search terms) may essentially change. For the businesses that live-and-die based on traffic that is generated by Google, this is pretty much of a big deal. Does that mean that companies will have to change their approaches to SEO to maintain their positions in search results?
Google will hardly ever unlock those secrets about Caffeine. But this new index has been live on some test servers and a lot has been said by Google's employees, so we can draw some logical conclusions about the change that may potentially take place in search engines environment.
Like any coffee addict prefers freshly-brewed beverage, Google Caffeine may attach more emphasis to fresh content. If you have an authoritative site and are running updates on regular basis that bodes well for your SEO campaign. Stuffing your website with original up-to-date content you may significantly increase your chances of hitting the top of Google.
Hence we may conclude that with Caffeine advent onpage factors will acquire much greater importance in SEO. Not only killer content, but also good site navigation, keyword density and prominence, meta descriptions, alt tags etc. will play an increased role in getting high rankings.
New Google's algo may also take a closer look at overall quality of your website. For example if your website is cluttered up with broken links, or its loading speed is riding low that is pretty likely to result in lower rankings. So you must brush and tune your site up to meet new Google requirements.
But does that all mentioned above mean that Google has downplayed offpage factors and they can be sidelined when doing SEO? No way. They still will be of huge importance for website optimization. And now the attention may be paid not only to the number of quality links, but also to some other factors. For instance the more social bookmarks your website has the higher rankings it may get. Linking to spammers and having spammers on the list of your link partners may also play a nasty trick and cause a dramatic drop of your position in search results. So if you manage to get round these pitfalls that will significantly enhance your chances to hit the top of search results and stick to it.
So, as you can see, the wind of change has brought lots of new challenges to SEO and you must find new ways to tackle them. And the first and the foremost task for now is keeping a hawk eye on your rankings fluctuations, since playing blindfold with Google isn't a good idea at the moment. Being in the know where your website stands in search results lets you adjust SEO process to the current situation and make deliberate and well thought-out decisions concerning your optimization campaign.
If you are an individual website owner and want to check your site positions for a couple of keywords in a single search engine that can easily be done by hand. But if you are an SEO, or a person running more than one site be ready to handle huge avalanche of work. You'll have to check your positions for a bunch of keywords in dozens of search engines and spend sleepless nights blinding your eyes in front of your monitor.
Dead-end? No. An automatic rank checker can be the right way out. It's a no-headache SEO solution, since it collects the data about your website's rankings for particular keywords in a mouse click. That lets you evaluate your SEO progress and implement necessary improvements.
There are lots of Google rank checkers out there, but, alas, only some can be a real leg-up in website optimization. 90% of them don't live up to users' expectations since they can't do the main rank checker's task- rankings check. They provide inaccurate data that can't be used in website optimization process. Besides Google doesn't favor automatic rank checkers for the sole reason that they load much pressure on the search engine when sending too frequent queries.
So what are the best rank checkers that can provide high accuracy of results and remain search engine friendly? Among the most popular ones are Market Samurai, SEO Book Rank Checker and Rank Tracker. All they ensure lightning-speed collecting of the information about the fluctuations of your website positions, but only Rank Tracker provides laser-precise data and is fitted with advanced search engines safety mechanisms, such as Human Emulation, Proxy Rotation, Random User Agents and supports Google, Yahoo! and Bing API keys. You can test all these rank checking tools and choose the one that can perfectly accommodate your SEO needs.
Bottom line: no matter what changes can take place in Google's algorithm, if you are armed with cutting edge SEO software you can handle optimization tasks easily.
