AtomicPR Perspective: The SEO impact of Google's new Caffeine index on public relations
Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Google recently announced a major overhaul of its search index which they've dubbed Caffeine. The new indexing system marks a major shift in Google's ability to index content in near real time - so fast in fact, that some sites report new content being available in Google's search index within minutes.
In the past Google (and all search engines for that matter) indexed content over time, processed it, and used that data to make periodical updates to their indexes. A few years ago one could expect minor updates monthly, with the occasional major shift a few times a year.
Over the past decade the search engines have gone more and more real-time, prioritizing some content over others. Sites such as news sites and higher profile blogs would be crawled and processed more quickly (usually multiple times a day) whereas other websites might only be crawled weekly or monthly. With the advent of truly real-time services like Twitter, Facebook, and others, even this crawling frequency was often inadequate.
Caffeine is a fundamental shift in the way Google indexes the web. Rather than have a layered index with different priority levels, the index is now designed to be instantly updatable.
Previously each layer of the index would have to be crawled in its entirety and then updated. With Caffeine Google now processes all content in smaller chunks and continually updates its index with the new content. In other words, when Google sees your content it goes live.
This has obvious PR implications. Now blog posts can ping Google and be live right away, providing for much richer near real-time content possibilities. Beyond blogging, all new content - be it on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, or anywhere else - can instantly surface on Google.
The implications of real-time search are like hashtags on steroids. Having an understanding of search and the factors influence rank now take on a much broader role, as all content can be instantly evaluated against Google's search algorithms.
AtomicPR has been weaving search principles into its practice for nearly a decade, with several of us having specific backgrounds in search, SEO, PPC, and content optimization. We view search as an intrinsic part of any PR / marketing campaign, not something to be bolted on after the fact. Read more about our approach to search here.
