No one knows exactly when Google will fully launch the Caffeine update that they’ve been talking about since August 2009. At least one data center went live with the update before the holidays, but Google didn’t want to hear too much complaining about lost holiday sales, so they decided to wait for the full launch until January or February.
Which means that it could be fully integrated into the search results very soon.
Are you ready?
The two major changes with the Caffeine update, according to Google, are:
1) Live results, specifically from social media channels and blogs, will be more prominently displayed.
Does this mean that blog feeds, Facebook updates, and Twitter updates will make it into the first page results? Or does it mean that link building through fresh content sites will become even more important to the search results? The answer is yes to both.
2) The speed of the site will factor into the organic rankings. Google wants its users to have the best experience possible, so site speed will play a more prominent role in their organic ranking algorithms.
There are a lot of ways to link build through social content marketing and methods to better optimize content on a website, but how exactly do you make your site load faster? Well, that’s where SEO Tool (our proprietary SEO platform) can help. Excessive code bloat, poor practices or whitespace on a page can slow down users and search engine spiders. Do you know if your code structure is positively or negatively impacting Google’s opinion of your site? Do you know what the average load time is of every page on your site? Do you know which pages are using gzip compression and which files aren’t using compression? Do you know how long it takes your homepage to load on average, over a long period of time (say 6 months)?
SEOtool can identify how many pages on your site are infected by Low Text-to-Code Ratio, Excessive JavaScript in the Head, Excessive JavaScript in the Body, Excessive Page Size, Excessive Whitespace, and of course, Slow Loading Pages.
If you’re not sure if you’re site is prepared for the Caffeine update, maybe it’s time for us to run a site-wide analysis. For a free demonstration, contact an SEOtool representative today.
