Lea Charlton

August 2008, Matt Cutts excitedly announced that a new Google Search Engine under development called Google Caffeine. He says that this is a new Google indexing system that required a team of architects to recode how the engine search works. SEO experts scratched their heads for a second while watching the interview (see below) and then scurried over to the Caffeine Sandbox (beta test site) to try the new Google engine search features.

The changes were not as apparent as I would have expected to see, though as Matt Cutt’s Q & A page explains,”even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure.”,  therefore it is agreed that there was not much to see on the surface. Every once in a while, I would spot a difference in a Google search engine position or two. The Caffeine Sandbox was available until after Google started testing live. I would like to note that I did notices the changes in the SERPS and this is what prompted my return to the test site. It was gone; just the message you see in the image below. I would have hoped they could have kept the Caffeine Sandbox active so that we could study the new architecture a bit longer.

Regardless, it is 6 months later and we are still waiting for the Google Caffeine Launch. I have been telling students and friends to expect Caffeine to launch after the holidays. This was validated when I placed a Google engine search for Caffeine and saw Matt Cutts new blog post, “Expect Caffeine After The Holidays“, in the 9th position on the first page. Guess I do know a little about how the search engine business works -eh? LOL

The following is what I have been noticing over the past few months. Google Caffeine may or may not have direct influence on these Google SEO changes, but after using similar strategies over the past 2 years and then all of the sudden not seeing Google search engine results as expeditiously as expected, I would have to say that these are direct results of Google Caffeine OR what occurs during live tests of the new algorithm. I am just grateful – as are most SEO experts – that the changes did not occur during the holidays. One year, Google did make code changes during the holiday season (I think this was two years ago; might have been three years ago). IT WAS TORTURE working on a rather large ASP website project at that time and clients having fits when seeing the page ranks changing on the Google toolbar. Little did they know, I was having fits as well because I was detecting inconsistencies in the SERPS and working double time to adjust metas and launch static pages. Keep in mind that one of the sites had many sets of dynamic metas to adjust for about 20k pages. This included changing the follow attributes until I noticed that the Googlebot was ignoring my desired crawl times. One of the changes of that Google update. The point is that we had to become psychics and work simultaneously in order to increase or maintain rankings DURING A HOLIDAY SEASON – this really ticked me off, so many thanks to Google for not doing the same this year. Meanwhile, wouldn’t it be funny if the Google Caffeine changes are so subtle that they launched it without telling us and will just announce in the 2010 New Year?

I will have to post a “stick foot in mouth” blog in that case – LOL – .  One never knows what to expect from this company!!!

What should we expect when Caffeine launches?

Caffeine will deliver Google search results faster and better.
- I personally did not see any major SERP changes aside of when logged into Google Accounts.
- The Caffeine indexing system was a bit more refined especially with the PPC & PPC rotations.

Parameter Control enables us to define which duplicate content the Googlebot should ignore.
- Click the Site Configuration tab in your Google Webmaster Tools.
- See the Settings and Parameter Handling – use it.
- This feature will instruct Google to read the duplicate content pages as ONE resource.

I will add more information as I determine Google Engine Search changes. Lets keep an eye out for when Caffeine launches and post comparison notes in the comments section of this page.

In the meanwhile … educate yourself on the new SERP and SEO changes.

This is what Matt Cutts had to say in the August 2008 interview with Webpronews.