I’m well aware that anyone outside of the SEO industry will be utterly incapable of making any kind of sense out of that title. That’s ok. I’ll explain.

Big Daddy was a software update that happened back in 2005/2006. It changed the way that Google indexed pages and ranked them. The biggest practical (for the every-day webmaster) upshot from the Big Daddy update was the increased importance of inbound links in determining rankings.

Enough about Big Daddy. Lets get to more recent news. Google’s just released another update called Caffeine. Caffeine is being billed as a mostly back-end, architecture and infrastructure change that will increase the speed at which sites are indexed:

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.”–Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Reading between the lines, however, I would like to focus on the term “accuracy.” To me, it implies that the results served up to the user will more accurately reflect the search terms used which means that Caffeine is actually changing the way that Google ranks websites. Although the changes won’t apparently be too obvious (at first) they are likely to affect fundamental aspects of SEO. Which aspects specifically will not, of course, be revealed to us, but with adequate testing it will soon be possible to get a general feeling for how Google’s ranking practices have shifted.

One completely undisputed fact is that Caffeine is definitely the biggest update Google has done since the Big Daddy update that took complete effect in early 2006. The changes may be more subtle, but they are there, and with further study, we’ll be able to re-evaluate our SEO techniques and refine them to adhere to the new ranking practices. Big Daddy rocked the boat immediately.

I get the impression that the Caffeine update will not be as visible as Big Daddy but will go a long way to keeping Google competitive as the world of search continues to change. In the mean time, SEO companies and practitioners will have their work cut out for them!

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