As major Google updates go, the search community must concede that Google Caffeine was launched with plenty of warning. And Google Caffeine is officially live according to a post in The Official Google Blog by engineer Carrie Grimes. Her post explains that instead of refreshing some parts of its search index every couple of weeks that Google continuously updates its index now. There are many reasons (some spelled Facebook, some spelled Twitter and some spelled iPod apps streamed to the web) for Google to move in this direction. Real-time search–you’ve undoubtedly seen Twitter results on a Google search page by now–has been around for months.
Real time search is going to be more prevalent. But your key takeway is that rankings will change more often. They’re already subject to a variety of personally specific issues like your location, people in your social network, your personal search history and more. Now the flavoring added to this stew is going to be Caffeine. I adore her explanation of the process:
Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel.
Your takeaway as a small business leader is that you should have stopped chasing rankings a long time ago and it really doesn’t matter how vast Google’s computing power is this year versus last. Last November, I wrote that leaders should stop demanding high rankings especially on arbitrarily chosen terms and learn about their analytics so they could focus on profit. That doesn’t change, no matter which way you take your Caffeine. Search engine results will be more dynamic, which means your SEO person (in house or hired gun) has a few more challenges, but we were already in a log rolling contest. The people who guaranteed high rankings are bs artists at best. Follow the money. Focus on profitability. And don’t stress about the changes because too much of this Caffeine will only hurt your health if you let yourself become stressed about the less important stuff.