Although Google rolled out Caffeine this summer, people are still finding its true impact. From the very beginning, Google has said that it was not a change to the ranking algorithm. However, it could impact ranking and many other areas, as Vanessa Fox of Nine By Blue explains.
She tells WebProNews that Caffeine consists of how Google crawls, indexes, and stores content online. Once the search giant crawls a page, it instantly takes that page and runs it through every part of the indexing pipeline and pushes it live. This means that a page could be live within a minute after it was crawled.
Another important note about Caffeine is the fact that it allows Google to associate more information about pages. Google now has the capacity to store any type of data in the future. This element is important since the Web is continuing to grow. In the future, Google could simply add signals if it needed to, as opposed to building a new infrastructure.
“This lays the groundwork for potentially changing the ranking algorithms in the future,” says Fox.
Speed is another factor of Caffeine that is natural since the Web is growing. Fox points out that the old index would have gotten overwhelmed and would, therefore, not be fresh.
Fox also addresses the MayDay update, which was an algorithm update, and what its implications are. This update received a bit of resistance due to its impact on content farms, forums, and product sites. Many of these sites dropped in ranking partially because they do not have a lot of links or content on them, which are prominent signals Google uses for ranking.
For more insights from Vanessa Fox, check out her book, Marketing in the Age of Google.