Google announced on Monday that they have been working on a new, souped up version of Google. According to their
official blog, the new developments will enable Google to "push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions".
What's the impact for your SEO campaign though? Should we be worried? If you remember the old Florida update, there was a lot of lost hair over the few months following that update.
At first glance there's not a lot to be concerned about. Google themselves have said that most of the changes are infrastructure changes, and that "most users won't notice a difference in search results". So, is a big sign of relief in order then?
Well, not quite. Although this might not be a big algorithm update, there will be some knock on effects to the search results. The important takeaway from the official Google release is "push the envelope on size, indexing speed,
accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions". Whenever you see the word
accuracy you know that Google is going to be looking at generating more relevant results, hitting the right sites at the right time. Quite what Google have in mind here is anyone's guess, but you
will notice some differences when the update is fully released to all live data centers.So far, I'm not seeing huge differences for our clients, although some testers on the web are
reporting an increased emphasis on keywords. We'll keep testing.
It's no secret that Google have been looking to break into the realtime search area for a long time, and these architectural changes look as though they're taking a step towards that goal. I would guess that their old crawling and indexing architecture was simply not sufficiently scalable for them to properly index the range of information sources and the rate at which information is being generated, hence this update. I only hope that with an increase in size and indexing speed they also sort out the many spam issues that they still have, which are one of the most important factors affecting search relevance.
If you want to take a look at Google Caffeine go check it out
here. You'll need to add the parameter &gl=uk to get a better UK feel to your results. Let us know what you think.
