On Internet Business

Google Caffeine: is this the end of SEO?

Posted by Michael under Search

Currently codenamed Caffeine (although complaints are being heard – and apparently serious ones – from the Mormon community, about the name) it’s a substantial upgrade to the Google search engine which, the developers say, will improve improves the speed of response to queries, the index size and the value of search engine rankings. If true this would make it a faster, more accurate, larger and more comprehensive search engine.

What is SEO ?

SEO is the art, craft, trickery or business (depending on your viewpoint) of optimising a web site by altering both internal and external aspects to increase the traffic arriving from search engines. Because most web traffic is driven by the big three or four commercial search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc, SEO is a vital part of online business strategy.

If your site isn’t fully and properly visible to search engines or your content doesn’t fit into their databases, you fail to get visitors who use search engines to find matches to their desires. In other words, a customer who may want what you have goes straight past you. It’s as if your High Street shop is blacked out, so nobody walks through the door.

Search queries are the words typed into the search box. Finding the best terms and phrases to register your site with search engines can bring massive results – search engine traffic can create or destroy a business

So how has Caffeine changed Google search results ?

Let’s start with what a search engine actually does. According to the google webmaster central blog a great search engine needs to:

1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
3. Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible

So, on those terms, Caffeine has changed the landscape phenomenally, and not always in ways that businesses want to hear about. The search is faster, search response times used to be a key decider in which search engine people use, but now response times are measured in milliseconds, it’s not likely to be a key determinant in Google Caffeine’s success.

More importantly, for business, the short term impact from the google webmaster central blogseems to suggest:

•        an increased weighting on domain authority and some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages and Feedfriend, as well as Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority.
•        perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names
•        either a bit better understanding of related words/synonyms or an algorithm that’s better at picking up related words and ‘curving’ the related word results back into the search results in proximity to the key word.
•        turning down some of the value given to video and some universal search results
 (source http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine)

 What is the likely long term impact of Google Caffeine?

Well, on one level Google is going to doing everything in its power to diminish the ability of the SEO industry to manipulate search engine results. This means that  the job of the SEO professional is much more demanding. The new s algorithm seems to rely more on keyword strings to produce better results which means that the keyword manipulation tools used by many businesses to fine-tune their search engine rankings are not just out of date, the actual model they are based on could be obsolete.

Is this the start of the end? Who knows? One thing is certain, it’s going to become harder and harder for new websites to come top of Google.

If you want to find out for yourself – try Google Caffeine here.

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