Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)
Editor: Matt Paines

| This News Blog is dedicated to bringing news, information and innovations targeting the Search Engine Optimisation industry.

Wake up to Caffeine

As the launch of Google's much hyped new system draws closer - many of us SEOs believe it could go live by the end of January - it's worth taking another look at the impact it will have on search engine optimisation.

Nicknamed Caffeine, the update has been described by Google engineer and Quality Control Team leader Matt Cutts as the largest and most fundamental change to the search engine's system since its Big Daddy update of 2005.

For those working in the industry the impact will be simple - when algorithms change, rankings change.

How the changes will benefit, or hinder, a sites individual ranking is expected to remain unchanged on initial launch. That said, search engine professionals and site owners must understand the key ingredients of Caffeine. As its name suggests Caffeine, focuses on speed and sharper focus with fewer search results served up faster.

To do this, Google is completely rewriting their indexing system and content, freshness will play a more important role whilst old outdated and stale content will be more readily excluded from the index. It is also believed that Caffeine will bring a new wave in duplicate content filtering - something I'll be speaking about in February at SES London.

Links will remain a key differentiator to improve a rankings once a web page has initial traction in the search engine results and, unlike some past algorithmic update shakeups, Caffeine is to not be targeted to changing the criteria of links and other off-page factors.

Post Caffeine, successful SEO will remain very much the same, in fact it will become more important than ever. For links to be most effective, they must be directed towards pages on sites that are quick to load, efficient in their coding, architected to facilitate a flatter crawl structure, and feature a high percentage of unique target relevant content.

Bottom line - more active content, blogs, news, more links, and improve speed of page loading.

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