Google Caffeine - What Do You Need To Know & What You Need To Do?

Google algorithms have always been something of a mystery for the search community. In fact, it has been the close guarded secret that nobody has been able to crack upon and all that we can rely on is the occasional hints of info dropped by Google every now and then.

Based on what Google spokespeople like Matt Cutts have to say and some other crucial observations, here's a run down on what Google Caffeine is all about and what you need to know to ensure that your website ranking only benefits from the update.

Relevancy of Page Speed

Google Caffeine places increased importance to Page Speed. How fast a website loads will have a determining effect on its ranking in the search results. And Page Speed further depends on a variety of factors such as your HTML content, CSS, JavaScript, use of images and graphics, domain hosting and so on. To know more about how you can increase the page speed of your website, read these tutorials by Google.

Domain Authority

Domain authority refers to the overall power of a particular domain. And this is one factor Caffeine places immense importance on irrespective of the number of incoming links or PageRank. Ignored for long, Domain Authority only came into spotlight after the Florida update in November '03 when it became one of the significant factor in the success of rankings in Google. Things like exact-match domain names coupled with lots of anchor text from diverse root domains can still outshine the occasional page from authoritative sites like Wikipedia, Amazon or the BBC but there are more cases that support the preferential treatment of the latter lot.

Blended Search Results

Caffeine aims to give users a richer serving of blended search results for their queries. In addition to multimedia content i.e. images and videos, Caffeine brings to you updates from Twitter feeds, Facebook entries and MySpace updates.

Content remains the King

No Google update can afford to ignore content! So content remains the unrivaled king. In fact, Caffeine just goes on to reinforce the importance of having outstanding content on your website. So make sure you invest your resources in creating rich and relevant content. Inbound links will just follow suit! Moreover, with increased focus on quality content, spammy website are pushed down the SERPs charts.

Domain Age

Brand new domains would have to struggle to make their way up in Google Caffeine results. This is because Caffeine places more importance on the age of your domain name i.e. the amount of time since it was first registered. This is a brownie point for established domain names!

Exact Match Domains

Caffeine update also seems to give more weightage to domain names that contain the exact search phrase. For example, the domain “www.buycars.com” will have higher chances of ranking on the top when someone searches for "buy cars".

Bigger Index

With Caffeine, Google has increased the index for a number of search phrases. Because of the increased speed of crawling pages, Google is now able to index more pages than it did earlier.