Google Updates Caffeine Algorithm
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
It’s been raining pretty much all day here in downtown Chicago. It feels like winter out there. That’s the November we’ve all come to expect here…
Today I was going to discuss October’s Adsense numbers that I put off talking about yesterday…but, I’m going to put that off for another day because Google announced another algorithm change this morning, this one happens to be a change to their Caffeine algo (not Panda or Vince!).
Caffeine? You’re making that up!
I know…the names get a little silly. Caffeine, Vince, Panda, Farmer, and on and on…whatever, techies are just weird like that.
What is Caffeine?
Basically it’s an old update (think early 2010 if memory serves) that was supposed to add sophistication to Google’s ability to index the Internet, allowing them to index more site, quicker, better, etc. It’s supposed to give them the ability to show you more fresh content, as it happens.
So it’s all about freshness.
Bad news for Adsense sites?
Yes and no. Many people write an article, post it on their website, slap an adsense ad up, and let things go at that. For those people, Caffeine is bad…because there’s nothing fresh about their particular website. It never changes, it never gets updated.
After all, if you kept adding new articles to every web site you own, every day, that would be incredibly time consuming and sort of exponentially expensive.
But to keep my sites fresh, I always build in self-updating functionality. Like adding a twitter feed, or programming links to change on each page automatically each day using a little php coding.
I’m convinced doing this keeps my sites looking “fresh” in Google’s eyes, and gives me a little caffeine boost.
So what’s new in this update?
Google announced this morning that the new Caffeine update will affect 35% of web searches. That’s a significant number!
Just remember that this builds on top of the old Caffeine system and attempts to bring searchers the most relevant, up to the minute type of information.
How can we use this?
Easy! Add up to the minute functionality to your websites! Program them to post breaking news rss feeds related to your keywords, add twitter feeds, add breaking trend data…all of this can be done fairly easily using php.
And if you don’t know php, and can’t learn…then hire someone to do it. Have them create a few scripts that you can easily modify yourself and add into every website you own.
This is really important now, and will be even more so in the future.
Why? Think about it….it’s in Google’s best interest to give people the most up to the minute information that they can. So you can bet your ass that Google will keep tweaking this as time goes on to make it more and more relevant. Build your sites with that in mind!
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
