Speed and sharper focus is the purpose of Google’s upcoming algorithm update, hence the name Caffeine, and the official launch date is somewhat of a mystery. With that in mind, we thought it would be helpful to provide an overview of what can be expected from the algorithm update.

Overview/Key Features of the Release

CRAWL TIME AND INDEXING - Results will be rendered faster (speed is touted to be doubled, and the index size will be much larger); Google is completely rewriting their indexing system to crawl sites faster and index more efficiently.

KEYWORDS – Caffeine will have a large focus on keywords and relevancy is a key factor of the release.

FRESH CONTENT - Keeping content fresh is a major focus; content updates should be frequent and thoughtful (i.e. written for the reader, not the search engines) as these updates will start to play a larger role (fits nicely into their goal of crawling sites more frequently and indexing more efficiently).  Expect to see new pages show up in the index faster than ever before.

LINKING and WELL STRUCTURED CODE - Links still play a key role; they should be directed to pages/sites that are easy for the spiders to crawl.  Therefore, coding efficiency will play a huge role.  Pages need to load quickly, be coded properly and architected in a way that makes it easy for spiders to crawl (and of course, the pages must have unique and relevant content).

DUPLICATE CONTENT - Duplicate content will be more aggressively filtered (i.e. if two pages are almost identical, expect one of them to be filtered out).

FOCUS ON NEWS and SOCIAL MEDIA/REAL TIME RESULTS - Will give more weight to news and social media results; the spiders will be crawling faster so they’ll be able to grab hot topics from news and social media.  Blogging, press releases, editorial content, etc., will play a much larger role in terms of content updates.

The Buzz

RANKINGS - Speculation is that rankings are unlikely to fluctuate much when Caffeine is rolled out as it is primarily an “under the hood” upgrade to Google’s search algorithms.

o Websites that lose rankings are probably relying on older content that hasn’t been updated in recent years.

SITE SPEED – As mentioned above, this is speculated to be a part of the algorithm.  Sites must render quickly; there’s a lot of crawling going on and the spiders need to do it quickly and efficiently.

Timing

Although the information available on this is vague, according to Matt Cutts, it is supposed to go live in one of Google’s datacenters (the implication was that this may have already happened) and that rollout to additional datacenters will happen “after the holidays”.  He indicated he “wouldn’t be surprised” if they gradually roll this out one datacenter at a time.

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