Google Caffeine – Challenges for SEO Professionals

The hottest debate raging on presently among webmasters is the pros and cons of the new Google Caffeine, which is being claimed to be a better search index, capable of providing fresher search results than the Google’s previous index, and also to deal with the vast information being added constantly in social portals like Facebook and Twitter. SEO pros have a challenging task ahead of them, in order to orient their search engine optimization strategies to suit the new search parameters of the new Google Caffeine search engine index.

Not too long back, Google was content with updating its search engine index once every month. This meant that every fresh content added to the web appeared in Google search results after considerable time, often after the relevance of the matter ceased to exist. A case in study were the 9/11 attacks on the American Trade Center, when Google was found highly lacking in broadcasting the latest news over the web. This spurred the search engine giant in to action, and it realized the importance of real time web updates. Google Caffeine was thus developed keeping in mind the need to live up to ever increasing users’ and web masters’ expectations to catch the latest content the instant it is published.

Google Caffeine focuses on updating its database on a continuous basis, and also appears to have higher crawling properties. The result is that you may expect to find your search page results quite different from the earlier, for the same keyword, each time you log in. Instead of crawling the entire web at once, Google Caffeine crawls small portions and updates its index constantly, immediately publishing the relevant content which meets all the white-hat search engine optimization requirements.

So what strategies should SEO professionals adopt while working with Google Caffeine? Though Google Caffeine provides fast updates of its database, it will be selective of the matter which is to be published on priority. Websites having a higher page rank will be crawled faster than the others. In addition, news feeds and blogs will be updated ahead of other sites.

Google Caffeine has incorporated a toolbar section for blog listings both above and below the search results, reiterating its affinity for quality content. Web pages reviewed, linked and shared via social networking and bookmarking sites like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and MySpace will also get instant visibility, which in turn will ensure more conversions. This is quite understandable, since as the Google SERPs are a major revenue earner for Google, it aims to display the most quality, the most relevant and popular web pages in its results. For the same reason, expect on-page search engine optimization factors like unique content, titles, page navigation, keyword density, alt tags, meta tags, page views to rank your website higher in Google Caffeine. Website speed will also be an important factor for higher rankings. With Google Caffeine, Semantic searches have become the order of the day. Properly researched SEO keywords and their strategic placement in the web pages will be helpful to get a place in relevant search results.

With Google improving its algorithms with a view of encouraging genuine, quality and relevant web pages in its search results, it is clear that short cut tactics in search engine optimization would simply not do. What needs to be seen in future is whether Google Caffeine will place greater importance to keyworded domains, i.e. domain names which have the relevant keyword embedded in them. SEO professionals reason that keyworded domains will have the searched keywords in their backlinks, thus bringing them to the top of the search results.

Source by Subhadeep Basu