For years everyone in search optimisation has been working to improve their ranking in Google. It is, after all, the ultimate tool linking buyers with vendors through Google's unique search algorithms.
Last week, Google launched a new version to the world and it will have a significant impact on your results. Google upgrades reasonably regularly; it keeps those of us in the know on our toes ensuring the sites we manage still rank well despite the changes.
New technology is a good thing. Google is not just trying to make life harder for everyone, their role is entirely honourable as they attempt to bring the most relevant content to people conducting searches.
What Is Caffeine?
Google is the industry leader in finding and indexing content, with bots regularly traversing sites and vacuuming up content. However, the web is expanding at such a phenomenal rate even Google needed to rethink how they could keep up with this continually new, richer, fresher content.
Using the old search index system, trolling the full World Wide Web for new content takes days, weeks, even months! Google were also relying on the 80/20% rule, meaning 80% of content hardly changed at all so why bother visiting those sites? Consequently, if you continuously updated and added content then your site fell into the 20% regularly visited sites, equalling higher ranking.
Today, modern searchers are NOT happy with old content or results that are weeks or even days old. Today we expect the latest relevant content will be found in searches the instant it is published. To address this issue, Google developed and released Caffeine. Caffeine is impressive, it finds and indexes new content and information on an incredibly fast basis, this means frequently changing content is even more important than before in improving your page ranking.
What do you need to do?
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Everyone will need to update content more frequently. I am not just talking about adding a full stop here or a line break there. To stay at the top of your rankings, content needs to be dynamic.
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Add more feeds to your site. Feeds from blogger.com, facebook or twitter need to happen real time to your site. This will ensure your dynamic content stays fresh, Caffeine will see the dynamic content and it will improve your rankings.
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Analyse and Test.
It used to take between four and nine weeks for changes to appear in the search results. Google has stated it hopes to have content changes on a daily basis starting to appear in the search results. Like everything else, search results are speeding up. This means you really need to measure changes in content each day to check what changes in your search results.
This may seem complex, but it is reasonable straight forward. As always, the CC team has all the tools and expertise required to help you solve this, and any other search issues as required.
If you are keen to improve your results or need help making your content more dynamic, take advantage of our expertise and contact us today.
by David Bilbow, Director, Customer Community
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