This month Google upgraded their search engine to a more efficient structure. Called ‘Google Caffeine‘ it’s a revamp of Google’s indexing infrastructure.

Previously, Google’s crawling and indexing systems worked as batch processes – the GoogleBot would crawl your website every few weeks, process the information, and then add it to their index. Now, Google’s index updates at the same time the page is crawled. In other words, when GoogleBot visits your page, it pushes it ‘live’ immediately.

How does this change directly effect website owners?

Google has stated that this change doesn’t make any of the crawling, indexing, or ranking factors more or less important than before, just that it makes crawled content show up in the search results faster.

Patrick Hare from submitawebsite.com explained how it directly effects website owners best here:

While Google is saying that its algorithm is unaffected, this does not mean that Google Caffeine won’t have an impact on rankings. Why? Because faster indexing and the ability to find more page types means that there is more information for the same algorithm to process. There are now more contenders for all keyword positions, and if they are making regular changes that Google can see, the ranking process can be more volatile unless you’ve got strong on-page SEO and more links.

For example, if Google couldn’t find someone’s relevant content previously, and now it can, your rankings could suffer even though you’re doing all the right things. For the consumer, however, the ability to access more information is a plus, especially if that information does a better job of asking the question implied by the search query.

In a nutshell:

If you are continually creating fresh, new, high-quality, unique content, and are on Google’s radar (ie: GoogleBot visits you), then Google Caffeine is your friend. If you are not and have more of a static, even a beautifully designed website, it’s still deemed ‘brochureware’ and of little interest. You may then be left behind, slowly disappearing off the top Google search pages.

In plain English, Google could find you’re too boring to be listed.

This means those companies with a good CMS-based website or blog (ideally based around easy-to-update WordPress technology), and also have lots of relevant, interesting news to post each month, will be the biggest winners.

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