On the 8th of June 2010 Google announced the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine.
What Is Caffeine?
Caffeine is a new web indexing system that provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches compared to Google’s previous index and it’s the largest collection of web content they’ve offered. Caffeine was built with the future in mind. It is built on a robust foundation that allows for an even faster and more comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results.
You can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published. Caffeine allows for indexing of web pages on an enormous scale. Every second, Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day
Why the change?
Due to growing content on the web in both size and numbers as well as the introduction of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average web page is richer and more complex. Also, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish. To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations, Google built Caffeine.
How does it work?
The image below illustrates how Google’s old indexing system worked compared to Caffeine.
The old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, Google would analyse the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when they found a page and when they made it available.
With Caffeine, they analyse the web in small portions and update the search index on a continuous basis, globally. As they find new pages, or new information on existing pages, they can add these straight to the index, resulting in fresher information than ever before – no matter when or where it was published.
The implications for SEO now, both online and offline
Caffeine is more accurate at presenting high quality websites relating to a specific keyword phrase. Google no longer uses the keywords found in the “meta keyword” HTML tag but searches for the keywords that have the most density in the first 50 words of the page. More emphasis is now placed on original, unique content and bounce rate. High quality inbound links with keywords in the link anchor text are even more important now than ever before. Caffeine also evaluates the popularity of the sites the links come from as well as the number of different sites that the links come from. A high number of links from a single Blog site will not lead to high keyword density. This makes the use of many different Social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Linked-IN, Digg, etc., even more important now with unique content coming from each site. Posting the same content on different sites will not increase your keyword density like it did in the past.
Google Caffeine places increased importance to Page Speed. How fast a website loads will have a determining effect on its ranking in the search results. Page Speed further depends on a variety of factors such as your HTML content, CSS, JavaScript, use of images and graphics, domain hosting and so on.
Caffeine aims to give users a richer serving of blended search results for their queries. In addition to multimedia content i.e. images and videos, Caffeine brings to you updates from Twitter feeds, Facebook entries and MySpace updates. Caffeine will search for rich and relevant content and inbound links.
Brand new domains would have to struggle to make their way up in Google Caffeine results. This is because Caffeine places more importance on the age of your domain name i.e. the amount of time since it was first registered. It also seems to give more weightage to domain names that contain the exact search phrase.
Google has increased the index for a number of search phrases. Because of the increased speed of crawling pages, Google is now able to index more pages than it did earlier. One can expect to see your newer pages show up in the index (but not necessarily well-ranked) sooner. Speed of indexation is good, but a bigger index means that you have even more work to do to keep yourself visible. You will likely have to do less work to become seen by Google, but more work to be visible to searchers.
Resources
- The Official Google Blog
- Google Blog Site
- WMTIPS.com
- The Sydney Morning Herald
- PCWorld.com
- EzineArticles.com
- Burceclay.com.au Global Internet Marketing Solutions
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Jeff, this is a great article that explains Caffeine in easy to understand terms. The implications section is really important. Great opportunities for website designers to go back to previous customers to do a refresh based on Caffeine’s new “priorities”. You could almost create a Caffeine “cheat sheet” from this! Not sure why we haven’t seen more about this in the twit-sphere. Probably because it is complicated. Thank you for writing yet another great post and helping to keep us all on top of things!
Nice article … it is help me to understand about Google Caffeine