Google’s Caffeine and Page Speed

There has been quite a bit of news circulating within the Search industry lately, and some of this news may have an impact on your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.  In case you haven’t heard, below is quick re-cap of two pieces of important information.

Back in August, I wrote a blog about Google’s Caffeine Update.  Recently, it was announced that this update will begin to be rolled out in 2010.  Not to worry, Matt Cutts reassured webmasters in his recent blog post that the improvements to Google’s indexing infrastructure won’t occur prior to January – after the holidays.  They will release Caffeine in one data center for monitoring, prior to the full roll out.

Previously there was a preview of Caffeine available.  This preview has now been removed and this Thank You note was kindly left:

“We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox”.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”
Stay tuned as this Caffeine update approaches!

Another important piece of information is that Matt Cutts announced that Google may be adding a new factor to the over 200 factors that are currently part of their organic ranking algorithm: website load time. If you’re currently an AdWords advertiser, you may be aware that page load time already plays a role in Quality Score. In an effort to improve searchers overall experience, this too may play a role with SEO in the future. If you are interested in finding out more about how to assess your pages’ speed, you can visit: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/.