Today Google announced the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine:

Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Source: Google Blog

There are many webmasters right now talking about the good, the bad and the ugly about Caffeine. There are two different points of view about what is Google Caffeine:

Google Caffeine The Bad

Am I to infer that this is primarily long tail results and by fresher Google means more recent? If so that’s a spammers paradise, content like guides and how to-s don’t need to be re-written but are often scraped and regurgitated and worse – mashed up.

I’ve personally watched a sub domain abusing MEGA SITE and 100% scraped content MEGA SITE have their traffic jump in the order of 400%. The mashup site ALWAYS has 100% fresh content because it steals it on the fly. Is this what Google feels the internet needs now?

Hope not, I can set up software to copy my own sites if the latest version gets the visit. I’m highly unimpressed by these changes.

I suppose that now we know – Top quality sites lost traffic because, well, Google thinks they are stale? In 1 query I was just able to find a mashup site with over 1.9 million indexed pages, all 100% copied from everywhere else online including hotlinked images. Good luck with that Google, this is deja vu a la 2003. If google has greatly expanded their capabilities how come thousands of well respected sites are losing pages by the boatload in the index?

Google Adwords:

Is Google in self destruct mode? if the SERPS suffer people spending money on adwords will start to notice the clicks arn’t worth what they are paying and will stop spending cash. Google has forgot that all they have to do is be a good search engine and THATS IT.

Changes on SERP

I have read and seen those sources too, but based on my experience in working on large sites and competitive keywords, the whole caffeine update has affected the SERP and the way Google indexed pages, links so fort so on.. They probably not admitting it yet, but soon they will, the data they have collected for Google Caffeine changes have somehow reflected the SERP, I have seen it.

They have given a hint too.. “Matt says this is like changing the engine on a moving car. For now, it’s all about indexing. The suggestion is that later it could have impact on rankings.”

Google Caffeine: The Good

If so that’s a spammers paradise, content like guides and how to-s don’t need to be re-written but are often scraped and regurgitated and worse – mashed up.

This is where QDF (query determines freshness) comes in to play, and my guess is the blogspot is as much PR as anything. One of the things we should keep in mind is Google is probably working with a 5+ year plan, not a ‘right now’, short-sighted, ‘but it’s not giving perfect results today’ idea.

My guess is they will need to make some adjustments to what they are doing and ranking with the new pages available to be scored, and will probably do so as they have in the past. Even Florida was not the end of Google, and somehow, I think neither will be the new additions to the algo, nor the faster indexing and storage system (Caffeine).

I think time plays a key role in the situation, and when they can make a ’5+ year’ implementation by taking what may look like a step back for a few months I think from a business perspective they would be silly not to.

5 years would be too long to have your content generate traffic for the sites that mashed it up, but that’s just my opinion.

I was talking about how they’d outgrown their old indexing and storage system and how long (at the minimum) I would guess they plan to use the new faster one. The results can be changed and adjusted and refined by the algo, but getting a more robust storage system in place was a must, and now, by changing the storage and indexing system (from Big Daddy to Caffeine) they have access to more data, which would logically and realistically probably throw a few wrenches into the results, which is something they can correct over a relatively short (months?) time, but they were basically over loading the old storage system (Big Daddy) and it needed to be changed.

Not really sure what you were talking about, because the algo and the infrastructure are separate systems… The algo basically processes and ranks the data within the storage system, and can be refined independently from the method used to store the data.

Caffeine is infrastructure, storage, organization, etc.

The algo still does the processing and ranking, so it probably needs to be adjusted to handle much more data than it had access to before.

The new algorithm is just a part of it

If anyone really thinks the algo changes are part of Caffeine, or doesn’t understand exactly what Caffeine is, please follow the first link in the October Update Thread and read through some of the articles linked beyond the first one.

The algo ranks the pages.
The infrastructure stores the information.

To say the algo changes are part of Caffeine is like saying the ‘PHP’ of a site is part of MySQL and because someone change to Berkley the ‘PHP’ is part of the new storage system… They’re not… They’re not the same thing.

They work together, but switching from Big Daddy to Caffeine is like switching from a MySQL to Berkley Database… The storage method and system changed, but that’s totally different than the ‘PHP’ doing ranking of the information contained by either.

If you follow the link you will find the Caffeine Infrastructure change (what MC and the rest of the people at Google draw a distinction from compared to an algo change) is a change from GFS I to GFS II.

The algo is not part of the Infrastructure (Caffeine) and Mayday (the algo change) is NOT part of Caffeine… It was in place before Caffeine was. The Speed portion of the algo was not part of Caffeine… It was in place before Caffeine was. If the algo changes were part of Caffeine we would NOT have thousands of threads in forums discussing updates and changes.

Google Caffeine: The Ugly

Many high quality sites are loosing rankings and many webmasters wants a reason for that. We as website owners need a clear answers on how we can make our sites “Quality” for the eyes of Google. With so many changes in Google we need clear updates on how we can manage our websites.

Still and will be a misterious when we come to Google and their changes. If you notice, every year there is a new “misterious” factor on Google that will make all websites and forums talks abut Google and their brand grows up much more (mouth-advertising). Did you asked yourself why people don’t talk about Bing? or Yahoo!? In my opinion, Google is a master on branding theirself and making people talks millions of millions of pages on forums, blogging and websites. Great move Google! You did it again!

Now, what is your opinion about Google Caffeine?

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