On Monday, August 10th, Google officially announced a new search technology they will be releasing in the near future.  The new technology is called “Caffeine” – that gives me the jitters just thinking about how this could effect ranking results.

According to Google, “For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

So, once again we come to the question, “How Does This Affect Me?”.  Well, that’s a great question!  No one knows for sure what changes this will cause to current keyword positions or what optimization changes will need to be implemented, if any.

Google does give us access to test the new search and from what I can tell, 99.9% of the keywords I tested came up in the same positions as the standard Google search.  That’s a good thing because Google is not known for rolling out improvements to its search engine.

I want to caution everyone – just because the results seem to be similar, doesn’t mean they will stay similar.  There are people reporting huge differences between Caffeine and standard search but there could be any number of reasons for that, the least of which is the change in search technology.

We will be watching and testing the new search engine as long as we have access to it.  Once it is launched, which will be at Google.com and won’t appear any different in looks than the current search, we will be testing heavily to see if the launch itself caused any changes to keyword positions.

If there are any changes that need to be made to your search engine optimization campaigns, we will send out a newsletter explaining what those changes will be and the time frames for making them happen.


Trevor Walter is senior marketing director and vice president of Freelance Marketing Group www.trevorwalter.com :: www.fmgconsultants.com