And it only took what, 10 months from the announcement?
Ok, I shouldn’t complain or poke fun at the delay – I love Caffeine! The first thing I’m noticing is that a whole lot more pages from this site are being indexed. Prior to the latest indexing update, I had about 200 URLs coming up for the site: operator under this domain. Now that Caffeine is out there, its closer to 500 before Google asks if I want to see more results similar to the ones displayed already.
Correspondingly, there’s been a huge jump on one of the keyword phrases that brings me significant income. From floating around between #6 and #9, the position seems to be locked in the top 5 for the first time since… uh, well since the Caffeine testing sandbox was live. Yeah, I even asked my friend Josh to search from a different computer & IP – just in case some cookies or customized results were creating false excitement.
So where are the extra indexed pages coming from?
The major improvement here seems to be in the way Google is currently indexing the PHPBB forum. Mostly, it seems that Google is starting to really finding its way around the funky URL characters and figure out where the unique content is. Instead of jumping through crazy loops in hopes of optimizing the structures, now the spider seems to figure out its own way around.
On the Pligg sites – not so much. Actually, Google doesn’t seem to like indexing these very thoroughly. Even after experimenting with a few different link architectures I still haven’t been able to get a thorough indexing to stick. I think some of it is a bias against the CMS – or at least how many places it allows spammers to sneak in and leave their links. Judging from the ratios of the ones I have access to, it looks like keeping the spam out and staying on topic is a lot more important than having a huge volume of pages and content. Its nice to have a self-propelled quantity generator like that, but that quantity is still only worth the quality it provides.
Not a ranking update – it just happens to affect ranks
Now, although there might be some SERP fluctuations visible due to this Caffeine update, the real cause of that is because of how the index is handled and merged with the search results. So they aren’t re-inventing pagerank or their relevancy scripts, they’re just trying to find more content and incorporate new content faster. If that helps your traffic, then keep doing what you’re doing. If that hurts, then you better get working on a new SEO strategy that includes some more social media, syndication, and live content!
hey John,
I’m glad if caffeine is helping you out. I’m not seeing much change.
I know it isn’t a “rankings change” but if google is indexing twice as many pages, and thus seeing a whole bunch of links it never saw before, I would expect there would be some ranking changes. I’ll be interested to see if there are any changes in the near future. In any event, more (index) is better, and faster updates are too.
Steve, aka chuck wuz here!
Yes Caffeine is alive and well, and from the looks its not going anywhere soon. I think the big difference between Caffeine and other algo updates is that the role out was gradual over time, so the results were not a sudden “shock” to webmasters.