Background Information:
A few weeks ago Google published a post on the webmaster central blog that a next-generation infrastructure update effecting how the Google Search Engine displays results is going to take place soon. Internally it is being called “Google Caffeine”.
An interview with Matt Cutts from SES San Jose was published a few days after the announcement and is available on WebProNews.com In this interview, and subsequent posts, Matt down-plays the change as less to do with algorithmic ranking changes, and focused on the coding enhancements this update will give Google.
The purpose of this update is for Google to crawl, index, and return search results on the rapidly expanding web. This means that results changes will inherently happen without direct intent.
To give webmasters a preview of what Google Caffeine will do they setup a sandbox for testing. Facesaerch’s Caffeine Compare is a handy new tool that directly compares the search results side-by-side.
1. Video Results More Prevalent With Google Caffeine:
After conducting several searches on celebrities and well known people you can see immediate change in the results for media types other than standard web pages.
For example, if you do a search for “Michael Jordan” in Google today the 4th listing is image results and the last results are book results about Jordan. With Google Caffeine search results we get no results for images or books, but get more video options!
If you have videos that are not published on YouTube.com then now is the time to upload them, because Caffeine is going to give them higher rankings than before.
2. Keywords in URL are more important than ever:
If you sell a single product or service and that word is not in your URL, consider re-branding your domain on the web to something that does. Even before Google Caffeine was tested we say Google search results trending to rank URL’s higher based heavily on the domain name.
We recommend you keep your brand or acronym URL if you got one, but if you are considering purchasing a new URL or re-branding, then consider your main keyword in the URL for better search results in Google.
3. Social Sites & Immediacy Results Enter SERP’s (sort of):
When news breaks who do you go to on the web? If you are like most people, you likely answered CNN, FOX, TWITTER, Facebook, YAHOO, etc – anything but Google right?
Google wants to curb this online behavior through some of their search results in Caffeine. This is so they can become not just the best everyday search engine, but also your online destination source for hot topics and current events too. Google has gone so far to develop a tool that does this called hot trends.
The death of Michael Jackson is the best case study for online search facilitating breaking news. Danny Dover at SEOMOZ had a great post on Michael Jackson’s death traveling the web. In this post he time-lines out how major websites were handling the information and displaying in search results.
I’m sure Google hated to see thousands of visitors flock to TMZ’s site for the latest info on Michael Jackson, but this is something Google is not good at. In fact, Google is susceptible to false claims, and if they are not more careful, they could end up losing credibility by having a “Jeff Goldblum episode”. If you have not seen the Colbert Report on “Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed” it is hilarious.
When it comes to satisfying immediacy while remaining reputable for everyday search, no one has accomplished this – not even Google. The challenge with real-time search is to keep credibility by filtering out bad and keeping the good. Not and easy job when you consider how massive and rapidly expanding the web grows every day.