There
have been some quite big changes in the way search engines work over the past
6-12 months, mainly due to Google rolling out what they’ve nicknamed the Caffeine update.
All this means that SEOs
now need a lot more coffee so that they can stay awake all night long wondering
how the heck to optimise their clients’ websites.
So what
is this Caffeine? In a nutshell, it is a new web indexing system that means that
the crawling and indexing of web pages now happens in parallel (in the past
these were two separate things). The impact this has is that the current index (and
thus the search results you see) are now far closer to real-time. Gone are the
days of waiting for your latest blog post to get indexed; this has probably
already happened by the time you’ve boiled the kettle.