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

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What will Google's roll out of Caffeine mean in the long term

Google's long awaited indexing infrastructure, Caffeine, has now gone live offering faster search results for all web content, including content deemed to be in real time.

According to the company the new system is more than 50% fresher than its last index. It also boasts the largest collection of web content so far and according to Google's Matt Cutts it means that all content can be searchable within seconds after its crawled.

Google says that the Caffeine infrastructure also makes it possible for the search engine to increase storage capacity as the web evolves and more flexibility in the type of details that can be stored with a document.

It is worth saying that Caffeine is a revamp of the search engine's indexing structure and does not, at this time, impact on Google's ranking algorithms. That isn't to say the the new technology won't have an impact in the future, just by enabling the search engine to take a different approach to the data and services it displays could well mean it will be able to change its basic ranking algorithm.

At the end of the day, speculation of what Google will or will not do has become a full time occupation, but a degree of confirmation came in a recent interview with Cutts who said that it is important to realise that caffeine is only a change in Google's indexing architecture. But the new flexibility can unlock the potential of better ranking in the future with those additional signals.

Previously, Google's crawling and indexing systems worked in batches, with Googlebot  (search engine spider) crawling a collection of pages and sites, processing the content it identifies and how it is interlinked with other crawled pages and associated data, thus determining what the pages are about and their importance before adding them to the search results index.

Although Googles crawling process was continuous, all the documents in the batch that it collected, had to be processed before becoming live.

With the new system Caffeine, when Google crawls a page it processes it through the entire indexing pipeline and pushes it live nearly instantly. Although this doesn't mean that pages will be crawled faster than before, once they have been crawled, they are made available to searchers much more quickly.

This in itself leads to the concept that news, blogs and social media will become more prominent in the search engine results, something already exprimented with, with some success.

It also reinforces the need to ensure a site keeps Googles spiders revisiting, if your cache indicates a two week delay between the last visit, then Caffeine will be of no benefit to you when you do have something to say.

As for content owners, they will see the immediate benefits without having to do anything, provided their content is accessible to search engine spiders and has enough credibility to be crawled frequently, but in the near future, as the web evolves, early adoption of new techniques that take advantage of Caffeine's flexibility may provide a boost when it comes to search engine optimisation.

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