Google Caffeine: What is it? Will it affect you?

Written by Simon Bennison

Wednesday, 09 June 2010 15:18

In Focus: Digital Marketing in the Charity Sector

In the past year, there has been a lot of talk about alterations to Google, with most of the talk among SEO people being about something called Google Caffeine.

Google Caffeine is the name for the new ‘under the bonnet’ improvements to Google that aim to improve the speed and accuracy of the search engine to deliver better search results to web users.

So what does this mean for charities looking to make more of their presence online?

Over the past few weeks you may have noticed Google looking a little different, but with Google Caffeine we are talking about more than just a change of layout and a variation on the logo. There have been some fundamental differences in the way the search engine indexes and ranks websites.

For marketers, Google will not exactly make your lives any easier by letting you know what the changes are, but testing and experience has allowed us to find out some of the effects of the changes.

Four key categories are central to the new changes:

Speed: How fast the new Google can load results.
Accuracy: How accurate the results are to the search term.
Real Time Search: How well the site captures breaking news.
Index Size: How many websites the search engine has indexed.

For most web users, the accuracy of the search results is the most important aspect of a search engine. In the past, Google has successfully improved the accuracy of its Sponsored Listings by introducing Quality Score to it’s AdWords ranking algorithm, and the Caffeine updates are similar changes that aim to improve the organic search results.

To check the way your website is being ranked, and how the changes have affected your company, you can compare the search results of new and old Google results on the Compare Caffeine website.

A more intelligent algorithm is more likely to discover malpractice and attempts to trick the search engine. We always advise that good SEO should mean working to best practice guidelines such as Google’s own Webmaster Guidelines.

You should never attempt to trick the search engines, and it seems this is more important than ever before as search engine algorithms are becoming more adept at penalising dodgy SEO techniques.

With or without the Caffeine updates, good SEO for your site will require:

Good quality, regularly updated and keyword rich content
A well structured and accessible site
Relevant inbound links from authoritative sources

In essence, this is the same as before, however Google is getting cleverer at searching out the sites that are trying to trick the system, and is working with the good SEO companies to ensure that those playing by the rule-book are getting good results.

The important thing with this is that it appears to reward well organised and structured websites. For charitable sites that want to ‘compete’ effectively for page rankings in order to gain access to those that prefer to donate online and build a more in depth relationship with those charities they give to, SEO is a vital tool that enables even the smallest charities to rub shoulders with the biggest.

In 2009, the charitable sector lost a total of 11 percent of its total donations as a result of the recession. The more innovative charities have identified that online givers represent one of their best opportunities to retain their levels of income from donations. There are currently no accurate figures for the total percentage of online donations made, but the expert commentators believe it to be big growth area and one that all charities can benefit from.

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