Google Caffeine?

Posted on by Eric

HELLO WORLD!

Fort Wayne Web Design - Caffeine - GoogleNo, I’m not talking about the latest Red Bull or the latest drink at Starbucks. If you haven’t heard already, I’m talking about the latest update to Google.

As anyone reading this blog would know, I’ve been really interested in gaining Google ranking for the terms Fort Wayne Web Design and Fort Wayne Website Design.  So far, I’ve had a decent amount of success.  If you go to Yahoo or MSN  (both BING.COM, now), I rank 1,2 or 3 (it depends – on what? who knows?).  But, on Google, I only rank 11 – that means I am number 1 ON PAGE 2. I’ve been moving up and down quite a bit on Google.  I’ve been as high as number 5 and now as low as number 11.

I have a bunch of thoughts about why I’ve moved down lately.  Mostly, I think it has to do with some settings in my robots.txt file.  I was trying to avoid the infamous duplicate content penalty – a tricky problem with WordPress.  But, I think it did more harm than good.

So, the question is, what does all of this have to do with Caffeine?  Well, recently Google has been publicly talking about a major update to their website ranking algorithm.  They are calling “caffeine”.

Here’s a few bullet point about what Caffeine means to all of us who care about Search Engine Optimization:

  • SPEED – rumor has it that the new update will speed up the search process a ton – but, I’m not sure who really cares.  I don’t know that we all complain that it takes too long to get the results.
  • RELEVANCY – this is where it starts to get interesting.  Google is trying to create more relevant results.  But, the million dollar question is HOW?  What is changing to make more relevancy?
  • WEIGHTING – it appears that some different things are being weighted higher.  It seems like Domain Authority and Domain Name exact matches are both being weighted higher.  Certain tags – like facebook and others, are being weighted higher, etc.

Want to know more?  Here’s a few resources to get you started:

The first link from Mashable has a video interview with Matt Cutts.  Here it is embedded for your viewing pleasure: