Organic SEO Consultant

Thanks to the trusty weekly roundup at the eVisibility Insider Blog this week I found this great piece on Google Caffeine from the Erick Schonfeld at Tech Crunch. It is a nice update on what Caffeine will bring.

The overall jist of it is that Caffeine’s main goal is to increase the speed of its results as well as integrate more “real time” results from sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.

But this is an SEO blog, and I am an SEO consultant, so we don’t care about Google getting faster or stuff like that. We want to know how this is going to affect our rankings. Right? Right!

Thank goodness that Summit Media conducted an independent study on Caffeine’s impact on rankings. They compared Caffeine results against current Google results for over 10,000 keywords.

They saw that on generic search queries news sites and social media sites were being given a bit of an advantage while other niche sites were ranking well for longer tail searches.

Most sites should not expect to lose many rankings, there were not many fluctuations, but sites with older content have a greater chance of losing out.

No changes to any one sector or niche over another. All changes seem to be across the entire index.

Domains with exact matched keywords had less emphasis

So overall not much to riot about. Things SHOULD be fairly stable as far as rankings go. But I’ll tell you this much, with the recent Page Rank update and Caffeine rolling out, things have been fluctuating. And if any of you use Google Alerts you will notice many more alerts coming through erratically and for content that is super old in many instances. I noticed this phenomenon right after Google integrated Real Time results. Seems that these changes did not mesh well with Google Alerts, which really has not been working well at all for the past year anyways.