Should Google Caffeine give you the jitters?

Photo by Espen Klum

Google Caffeine, the worst kept “top secret” project of 2009 is ready for roll out early next year.  After a flurry of speculation caused by the beta version disappearing, Google blogger Matt Cutts confirmed the news that one of your New Year’s resolutions is going to be “check my position in the Google rankings”. For now though, we wait.

But what are we waiting for, exactly?

On the surface, Google search won’t look too different. Video and news results will appear half way down the first page instead of at the top, which is hardly revolutionary. Instead, Google have focused their efforts on what happens behind the scenes, in the elusive indexing algorithm that determines the fate of your website in the natural search rankings.

It’s difficult to tell you exactly what the impact of Google Caffeine is going to be until it goes live, but there are some clues out there which indicate how our current non-caffeinated search is going to improve.  Mashable conducted a detailed comparison of Google Caffeine back in August explaining the difference in old search vs. the new release, and in summary we should expect Google to:

• Be faster
• Give more relevance to keywords than before
• Increase the size of search results

There is also evidence to suggest results from social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been given a boost, with Caffeine able to produce searches of real-time content like status updates and tweets.  This means social media and search just got cosier.

What now for your search marketing plans?

In the short-term, it seems Google Caffeine is going to provide some subtle improvements to the mechanics behind Google search without impacting your search ranking in a significant way – for now.  However, once released we recommend checking the impact on your key landing pages to ensure you have not dropped in rankings in a significant way.

In the long-term search engine optimisation just got trickier.  The results of various studies into Google Caffeine have all found relevance of content being more important than ever before.  Glossing over keyword research in the future will put you at a serious disadvantage if you want to compete for popular phrases.  For people who have dismissed social media’s ability to provide ROI, Google Caffeine is an interesting development.  Search marketing and social media are set to become the best of friends. Now is the time to start thinking about your social media strategy if you haven’t already.

If you have any questions or thoughts on the impact of Google Caffeine we’d love to hear your comments below.