Google Caffeine – It Lives!
Ok, sorry about the “spooky” headline. I know it’s a few days after Halloween but I couldn’t resist.
In case you haven’t been watching your search engine rankings, Google is testing its new index called Google Caffeine. This is on top of the Page Rank (PR) update they did last week.
Google Caffeine is the developer preview of the next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. In a nutshell this means that Google is testing several new things and the way it’s algorithm works.
Now while Google search engine isn’t changing the way it looks, there are lots of new “computing” changes being rolled out on inside that will change the way your sites rankings are displayed.
For example, Google seems to be tweaking:
- Search features
- indexing
- ranking mechanisms
- local search results
- etc.
From what different professions SEOs are seeing, Google Caffeine is ranking many sites differently and a lot of pages have gone both up or down in this new index. Isn’t that par for the course with Google? Yes, but this time it may be different.
For example we monitor the PR rankings of over 375 domains using a cool new software that we developed and I can tell you, Google is differently ranking sites differently then it use too and for a number of reasons I’ll talk about later.
Once Google is done testing, Caffeine is supposed to replace the old Google bringing all the changes with it. But that leaves a lot of uncertainty in the market.
Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to track your sites rankings, pages and back links over time from just one tool? Heck yes! ….But I digress.
There’s no telling exactly as to how and when this transfer will take place, (rumors are it could be the first week in November) but we do have an official public preview of what the new Google will be like at http://www2.sandbox.google.com.
But a first disclaimer – You gotta have those right? - Google’s been bouncing back between it’s old software and then new Caffeine software here all day, so if you test your domain using the URL above. You may or may not get different results.
One of the things you’re sure to notice is that now Google is looking at where YOU are located so that it can include “Local Search Results” within those displayed
on the search results page.
Here’s an example:
Today Google looks pretty much the same on the outside, but functions differently. There are changes in the number of pages indexed, keyword suggestions and most importantly — in the search results and how they are displayed.
How are you going to stay on top of your search engine rankings, number of back links and competitors?
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Hi Don,
thanks for the update very interesting.
I guess you have to hope your ISP is close as in my case they are on the opposite side of the country
A positive progression overall I would say for sure
Regards,
Andrew (Australia)