Google Caffeine – Is Your Web Site Caffeine Tolerant?
Google announced last week that a major search indexing revamp had been in the works for the last few months. Named Google Caffeine, the new infrastructure promises to have improved crawling, indexing and serving of results.
Matt Cutts, Google engineer, mentions that when it comes time to deploy Caffeine to the public that general users will not notice much difference.
The big question from the power users and search professionals is whether or not rankings will be affected. A drop in rankings for key terms related to your business website equates to a drop in traffic.
Taking a quick look at the Caffeine testing tool available and searching for Google Caffeine bought the following findings:
First two results in Caffeine testing tool
First two results in Google.com
Going from the result statistics shows that Google Caffeine:
- does seem to have a larger amount of pages indexed for the term (5,240,000 v 4,710,000)
- does seem to return the results faster (0.07seconds v 0.27 seconds)
- possibly crawls and updates index more frequently (different page title & meta description for same URL)
The search button was spammed a few times just to make sure these figures were not anomalies.
Further down the list there was a few differences found, with a blog article from Matt Cutts finding its way in the top 10 caffeine index while not being present in the normal one. A blog article on the David Naylor site present in the top 10 results normal index also got lost in the caffeine index.
Thought still early in testing, you should have a look how your website looks for your currently well-ranking keywords. Is your site caffeine tolerant?
