We spill the beans on Google’s 2010 update known as Google Caffeine.
In 2009, Google mentioned that a new search index called Google Caffeine would be launching in 2010. Google rolled out Google Caffeine across their entire network of data centers, regions, and languages in 2010. The most important thing to note is that Google Caffeine was not a new search engine algorithm and it does not change the way websites are ranked; it is an index and according to Google will speed up search results by 50%. Read more about Google Caffeine and how it impacted SEO.
What is Google Caffeine?
As previously mentioned, Google Caffeine was a new search index released in 2010. Indexing occurs when spiders crawl your Web pages – this information is then stored on Google servers. When you do a search on Google, you do not search the actual web; you search on Google servers based on what the spiders have found and indexed. Caffeine was a revamp of Google’s indexing infrastructure to index content quicker. Find out more about how the Google Search Engine works.
How did Google Caffeine affect SEO?
Faster search results
Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish. The Caffeine update meant that when you create or modify existing content, these changes will be reflected quicker in search results. In fact, Carrie Grimes, a Google Software Engineer stated that Google Caffeine would provide 50 percent fresher results for web searches.
Higher storage capacity
The new indexing infrastructure was built with significant storage capacity as the Web grows and evolves in nature. Google says that 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 new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.
Flexibility
Google has always associated a variety of details with documents it stores whether it’s a Web page, image or video. For instance, when Google indexes a web page, it also stores information about what external pages link to that page and what anchor text is used in those links. The Caffeine infrastructure meant more flexibility in the type of details that can be stored in a document.
What do businesses need to do?
SEO requires regular maintenance which involves updating website content and ongoing link-building strategies, however you shouldn’t need to massively change your strategy to suit Google’s updates.
On-site content, fresh content and link building came further into play when Google Caffeine was released as it meant Google would be able to index these new updates quicker. To keep in line with Google Caffeine and other updates since focus on updating your content regularly and keeping a continued focus on quality link-building strategies.
Google Caffeine’s rollout didn’t necessarily mean that pages would be crawled faster, but that they would be available to searchers more quickly. This meant that whether you published a news story, a blog or a forum post, you could find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.
Please feel free to contact your SEO expert to discuss the Google Caffeine update and the implications for your website in more detail.
