August 14, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
Earlier this week, Google unveiled its new search infrastructure, Google Caffeine. In reaction to this announcement, online marketers have been buzzing about how these new changes could impact Google rankings for various websites. While this is definitely a valid concern, Matt Cutts of Google is urging people to lower their level of paranoia and continue to rely on the basic Google mantra “Trust Us.”
With Caffeine, many users won’t see a difference with their search results. This is because the changes are mainly “under the hood.” In other words, Google is changing how their infrastructure indexes and serves results by making everything go faster. In the old days of search, it would take anywhere from 3 to 6 months for Google’s index to notably respond to changes in a website. Over the past two years, they have sped this up to a 4 to 6 week window, and sometimes even just a few days. Now with Google Caffeine, Google promises to crawl the web faster and keep their index relevant with more timely updates.
With these changes, Google is also promising to keep search results as close to the same as possible when changing from their current index to Caffeine. Still, search engine marketers are skeptical, and already finding differences between the two platforms. A significant change is that out of date websites seem to be dropping off of page 1 results, while websites with more frequent updates are holding strong on page 1. This is to be expected considering Google’s main goal with this change is to keep the most relevant (in other words up-to-date) content at the top of search. Online merchants should take this into consideration when preparing for this change. To keep a storefront up-to-date, merchants should consider using a shopping cart with a customer review feature. This let’s your customers update your pages for you.
Webmasters can toggle between Google’s current search index and the testing platform for Caffeine, to compare search results side by side and determine how these future changes will effect their website. For online merchants, it will be very important to compare your current vs. future results, to ensure that your year over year traffic numbers will not be hindered by these changes. To do this, simply make a list of your top 100 traffic driving keywords and compare your ranking side by side.
Amy is the co-founder of ZippyCart. She went to school for film in Cleveland, Ohio and ended up working in the field of viral video marketing, which eventually led her to her real profession: SEO. When she's not writing for ZippyCart, she can be found out and about Seattle, WA.
