Should Google’s Caffeine keep your marketing team up at night?

A major update to Google’s indexing technology known as Caffeine went live back on June the 8th.  It is not a change to the page-rank algorithm, it is a change to Google’s indexing infrastructure.  In brief,

• I used to see changes in the index for our clients’ sites in about one to two weeks.
• I’m now seeing changes in the index in 1-2 days …or pretty darn close to real time.

This is huge – but it will help only those clients who have been following our counsel from time immemorial, and thus continuously posting new content to their website and their blog.  Oh yes, and nowadays also using social networks a’ la Twitter and Facebook.

I thought I might give you a closer look at this change and its impact as viewed by a few other search pros…

Gary Stein, posting on ClickZ
“Google’s spider has always been attracted to content that changes frequently. You want to be seen as a part of the 20 (or so) percent of the Web that needs special attention.  Now that dynamic content is even more important, and social media remains the best way to do this.  Just make sure that the content that you’re bringing in is still relevant to your core site’s topic.”

Rebecca Murtagh, posting on All Virtual Marketing
Two simply unforgettable quotes:
“Google Real-Time Search will forever change the search engine landscape.”
“Content is king …now more than ever.”

Rebecca notes that Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web Spam team, mentions Google Caffeine on his blog, stating that Google will process over 1 billion pages per day for “real time” indexing.  Real-time indexing is aimed at finding fresh content on websites and on social media sites such as Twitter, but also will include new press releases, blog posts, FriendFeed, Jaiku, etc.  Google expects to include MySpace and Facebook in future evolutions.

Stone Reuning, posting in Search Engine Guide
If you update your content regularly, this is great news.  “Since Google now refreshes its index much more frequently, it will be constantly looking for the most relevant results to display for any given search phrase.”  But if not, “over time, you may find your site slipping as others who do have a stream of content start to fly past you” in the search engine results pages (SERP).

Stone provides a helpful list of things to do in light of the Caffeine upgrade, including:

• get a CMS (Content Management System) to ease updating, if you don’t use one already
• update the Knowledge Center on your website regularly
• post your press releases on your site
• archive your email newsletter on your site;  tweet and blog about each issue
• step up your social media effort, to include…

- keeping your blog rolling
- setting up a Facebook page
- tweeting …minimally as new content is posted or blogged
- putting announcements & other key moments on video, then YouTube

You can capitalize on Caffeine by doing what has always been recommended as a best practice:  finding ways to continually freshen your website content. But now if you don’t, you can expect to see your rankings slip below those of competitors who do.