Google Caffeine Goes Live

Google Caffeine - the latest upgrade to Google's search engine infrastructure is now live across the world. Read about how it can affect your Google SEO.

We spill the beans on the recently launched Google Caffeine index …

Late last year, we mentioned that a new search index called Google Caffeine would be launching in 2010. Google has now announced that  Google Caffeine is now live and rolled out across their entire network of data centers, regions, and languages. The most important thing to note is that Google Caffeine is 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 if it will impact your Google SEO.

What is Google Caffeine?

As previous mentioned, Google Caffeine is a new search index. 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 is a revamp of Google’s indexing infrastructure to index content quicker. Find out more about how the Google Search Engine works.

How will Google Caffeine affect your Google SEO?

Faster search results: Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish. When you create or modify existing content, these changes will be reflected quicker on Search Engine results. In fact, Carrie Grimes, a Google Software Engineer says that Google Caffeine will provide 50 percent fresher results for Web searches.

Higher storage capacity: The new indexing infrastructure has been 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 provides more flexibility in the type of details that can be stored with a document.

What do I need to do?

Just keep on doing what you have been doing. SEO requires regular maintenance which involves updating website content and ongoing link building strategies. On-site content, fresh content and link building is likely to come into play when you consider Google Caffeine will index new updates quicker. Keep on updating your content pages regularly and keep a continued focus on your link building strategies.

The introduction of Google Caffeine doesn’t mean that pages will be crawled faster but they will be available to searchers more quickly. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now 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 to your website in more detail.