On 8th June, Google announced the completion of its new web indexing system, Caffeine. Google created Caffeine to ensure that its search results would offer users the most up-to-date content for any given search term. What this means for your business is that the rewards for regularly adding fresh content to your website are now greater than ever before.
Google Caffeine is Google’s new web indexing system. It is designed to enable users to find the most recent available information relating to their search term. Google says that compared to Google’s previous index, Caffeine produces search results that are 50% fresher.
Google Caffeine matters to your business because it affects the search results that Google provides. If a site has shown signs of recent activity, then Google will treat that site as more interesting than another site where there has been no recent activity. Google is therefore likely to award a higher rank in its search results to a company that has recently added content to its website than to a rival company whose website has remained unchanged for the past two years. And the higher you rank in the search results, the easier it is for a potential customer to find you.
When people search the web on Google, they are not searching the web itself, but only the index of the web Google has created. Before Caffeine, Google used to update the main layer of its index every two weeks. The advantage of Caffeine as an indexing system is that it is updated continuously. Caffeine is a change ‘under the bonnet’ and won’t make the process of performing a search feel different to the user. But by removing the time-lag, Google can give pages where there has been recent activity higher scores, thereby helping users to find them.
To stay ahead of your competition you need to keep on adding good quality content to your site – so keep those press releases, blog posts and new content rolling.