Google Caffeine and it's Impact on SEO

Google fully rolled our their new web indexing system, Caffeine, on June 8th this year. But what are the implications for SEO and link building?


If you weren't already aware, when you search on Google, you aren't actually searching the internet in real time, you are in fact searching Google's latest version of the web stored at their many data centers around the world.  It's one of the reasons why Google searches are so fast and the search engine made such an impact when it launched, compared to the chronically slow search times of the previous generation of search engines.

Of course to keep their version of the web up to date, Google constantly indexes the real web.  The way that they do this has been updated to a new system, named Caffeine, which Google claims will help it index a rapidly expanding web in a faster and more effective way.

Caffeine has been available for testing since August last year, and so there has been plenty of time for SEO experts the world over to speculate on the impact it will have on search rankings and results.

One of the issues identified is that Caffeine will start to give greater priority to websites which participate in their online community through forums, social media, social bookmarking and so. Websites which become the topic of social chatter, and get linked to, may perform better in search results as they are seen to have human votes of popularity instead of the purely link based popularity used by Google Page Rank in the past.

If true, this could be seen as an attempt to better 'socialize' Google search results in the face of the ongoing growth of Twitter and its potential to become a real time search engine for what's being discussed right now.

I have also read rumours that links on sites like Friendfeed for example will carry greater credibility for backlinking (tacit admission that Friendfeed still does better what Google Buzz set out to emulate?).

So the upshot is that your social media strategy for your website is likely to become even more important than ever, and probably needs to be broadened out from just Twitter and Facebook to include niche networking sites, forums and so on, ideally within your industry vertical.