A Little Caffeine With Your Search
Those of us who obsess over search engine traffic (and that should be just about everybody, right?) are having a hard time keeping up these days. First, there’s the new Bing, which we talked about a while ago. Then the combination of Yahoo! and Bing, followed by an announcement by Yahoo! that they are still working on their own search.
But despite all that and how much I personally like Bing, the 800-pound gorilla in the room remains Google. And now even that dominant search engine is changing with the recent announcement of Google Caffeine.
You can see a development version and give it a test drive. If you haven’t checked to see how your site fares in Caffeine, you should. Ben Parr did a terrific comparison not long ago, that’s a little scary in that the game may be changing for SEO.
I did a test for “Greystone” (hey, it’s as valid as any other test, right?), and found very different rankings. We come up 8th on regular Google, but drop all the way to 39th on Google Caffeine. We’re #3 on Bing (another reason to like them). What’s interesting is that our Twitter account was #37 on Google Caffeine, two spots higher than our own site, but doesn’t even show up in the top 50 on regular Google.
Some have speculated that there’s an increased focus on keywords, and others that the whole realm of social media is moving up the search food chain. Until there are clearer answers, we’ll have to watch very closely.
With Caffeine still in development, the results could change, and anybody familiar with the Google Dance knows that the results could change fairly quickly.
But if Google Caffeine is the 800-pound gorilla reborn, we ignore it at our own peril!
Very nice post, far much better than most that I have read. I like the way you mentioned the facts of the matter and the sequence that you followed because that is where it all is.