Super Search Engine Marketing

Well google today announced what many of us in the SEO community have been seeing for the past few months, the update to it’s search engine called CAFFEINE.

But what does it really mean to the average internet marketer or website owner?  Not much really.  For the most part sites that are semi-static sales sites that are well SEO’ed are not going to be affected by Caffeine.  The only exception to this would be if one of your search terms suddenly becomes popular on the net for some reason.

What do I mean if a search term becomes popular? Well simply put say your search term is Caffeine.  Right now when you search google your going to find lots of blog entries like this one showing up as most relevant because lots of people are chattering in blogs, news articles, etc about google’s updated search engine that google is going to assume your looking for information about the HOT TOPIC OF THE DAY, which happens to be your search term.

This is something that is not totally new, it has been happening to a number of clients of mine for a while now.  For one reason or another some have been bumped down in ranking for a few days when one of their key terms is the topic of the day.  So from time to time if your keyword happens to hit the news or the blogs out there, then your likely to drop in rank until the term is no longer a HOT TOPIC OF THE DAY.

The other major change that I would be most unhappy about if I was an advertiser is the inclusion of local and shopping results.  As an advertiser to have someone local show up in search results that I am paying for with clicks is not something easy to overcome.  That has been one of the few unifying things with web advertisers.  They are all mail order over the net.  Well not anymore.  You search for something and you find advertisers listed and then you see a local business, your more likely to use the local result than the advertiser who may be thousands of miles away.

Google is likely to get some real negative feedback when search results are not returning what people are looking for.  They are likely to get even more negative feedback from advertisers who have to compete with “natural” local results for search terms.  Look for more changes from google.

Everyone is abuzz in the SEO world about the forth coming update to the search formula Google uses to show results called Caffeine.  The question on everyones lips is “What is gonna happen to my rank and position in the search results?”

It’s already clear to me that parts of the update are already being put out there by Google.  They do not want a repeat of the much Famed Florida update to search results.  So little by little Caffeine will be tossed in as incremental updates to the search formula.

But what is going to count to google to produce search results that are relevant to the user? Google has already indicated that it is going to try to go with more real time relevant results.  OK, what does that mean?  Google is going to look to see what is most active on the net for various terms, Google says it wants to crawl and index more of the net more frequently.  OK, so their bots are gonna be more active and looking for information from where?  Google indicates it is going to be watching the social networking items out there.  Things like Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and other social networking tools.  So what does this mean to the average retailer of a product or service who is ranking for a search term? Not much in my mind.  Unless your position changes regularly because one of your terms happens to make it into the news or gets tweeted about for some reason.  For a site like say my Gourmet Coffee site where my search terms are coffee related I do not think that Caffeine is going to make much of a day by day lasting impression.  However at moments when other coffee companies make a major move and happen to get tweeted alot it could change results temporarily.

My thoughts are that for most peoples positions you may see some minor shifts, either up or down depending on the changes made to the search results.  I do not think your suddenly going to find yourself rocket to the top or drop off google if your already ranking well for terms and getting traffic through those terms.

Sparky