Google Caffeine And Your Website Rankings

In extremely big news, Google last week announced that it has rolled out a new web indexing system across the majority of its data centres. This is important, because it is the biggest change Google has announced in the past five years in relation to how it ranks websites. The upgrade has been called ‘Google Caffeine' and the emphasis of the change is on rewarding websites that consistently publish fresh content. In Google's own words the change reflects the fact that ‘with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex'. Google has made it clear that this is not a change to the algorithm that it users to determine the most relevant websites in its database in relation to a certain query, but rather it is a significant change to the way that Google indexes websites in the first place

Here are three main things we recommend that our customers do to take advantage of the change:

1.Run a Blog and/or News Section

Now more than ever before running an up-to-date news and/or blog section on your website is crucial. The caffeine change is all about content. Essentially Google has overhauled its web indexing system to ensure that is captures fresh content as quickly and comprehensively as possible. Your website needs to respond to this change. We are encouraging all of our customers to run either a blog or news area on their website. Both of these modules can be activated free of charge via our content management system (CMS) so please contact us if you need a hand configuring these on your website. In your blog or news section you need to post content that will be of interest to existing or potential customers. It is your opportunity to become an expert in your field. Whether you are an electrician, banker or web developer, potential customers want to know that they are dealing with an expert. Your blogs or news items can be accompanied by images, video's (such as embeds from YouTube) as well as other rich content like maps and podcasts. Ideally you should be adding at least an article a week to your blog. I know from personal experience that it can be hard to find the time, but the long term gains make it worthwhile. We regularly have potential customers make contact with us that have stumbled across a blog article we have posted in Google and liked what they read.

2.Keep Your Content Fresh

Considering that the emphasis of the caffeine change is to allow Google to provide fresh content to searchers as quickly as possible it is obvious that you need to keep your website content up to date. The importance of running your website through a CMS where you can make changes in your own time, and at your own pace, is now beyond debate. We encourage our customers to login into Mission Control (their CMS) and make changes to their website at least once a month, but hopefully a few times a week. Google loves to see companies that are making changes to their website, posting fresh content, archiving old content and generally behaving as a good ‘web citizen'. You should ask yourself; what can you do to make your website more up to date and more relevant for users? It is likely the things your visitors will want to read, will also be well received by Google.

3.Take Social Media Seriously

In the early days of social media and social networking there was quite a deal of conjecture as to how useful social networking would become for businesses. Many argued that social networking was great for keeping in touch with friends, and developing social relationships, but would prove to be of limited benefit for businesses. It now seems almost unanimous that most businesses can in one way or another make great use of social media. There are literally thousands of businesses that have been built or have enjoyed rapid growth due to their ability to harness sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. You should be doing things like running a Fan Page on Facebook, creating a Twitter account and creating a company page on LinkedIn. You can then make use of tools like Posterous, Tumblr and delicious to better syndicate your content across the web.

Finally, my big piece of advice is to not view Google Caffeine as a threat, but as an opportunity. If you respond before the competition, you should be able to take advantage of this important change and generate even more new customers!