Google named their biggest update of the year “Caffeine.” Finally, a search algorithm I can get behind.
It’s been six months since the rollout, and I’ve had enough time to see what actually changed. For the city guide I’m marketing manager of, organic search is our biggest channel. So when Google announced Caffeine back in June, I was watching closely. Now I can say what it actually meant for us.
The short version: faster indexing is real. An event going on sale in the morning can appear in search results that afternoon. Before June, we’d wait days, sometimes weeks. For a listings site, that lag was maddening. You’d publish something timely, check the next day, nothing. By the time it indexed, the event was half sold out. That problem has largely gone away.
The MayDay update back in April was scarier at the time. That one targeted thin content on long-tail queries - exactly the kind of pages a listings site can accidentally accumulate. Event title, date, venue, two-line description copied from a press release. Thousands of pages like that. Some competitors got hammered.
We got lucky. Or perhaps we’d been doing it right without knowing why. Each listing had unique editorial content - capsule reviews, context about the venue, suggestions for nearby places. Not because we were gaming search, but because that’s what a good listings magazine does. Turns out Google started rewarding that approach.
Looking back at 2010, the message seems clear: speed and quality, together. The days of publishing fast OR publishing well are probably over. You need both.
I suspect the sites that got caught by MayDay haven’t seen the last of it. Google seems to be building toward something bigger on the content quality front. Whether that arrives in 2011 or later, the trajectory is pretty clear.
For now, I’m going to keep enjoying my Caffeine. The Google kind and the actual kind.