This week Google have announced that they’re going to start rolling out a new algorithm called ‘Caffeine’ in the new year. I don’t think it’s going to have a huge impact on rankings (at least, I hope not!), but it will impact on how Google indexes websites. With the growing popularity of social media, Google needs to be even faster at indexing web sites to ensure results are as current as possible. This means that the ‘bots’ that index sites will need to be quicker at indexing pages – and the slower your pages are to load, the slower the bots will be at crawling your site. Therefore, if your site is loaded with large images files, or flash, it could slow down the indexation of your site whch could put the ‘bots’ off altogether (or at least mean they index your site less often).
In a recent post from Matt Cutts (a leading Google engineer), the presentation shows that Google is going to be looking at the speed of sites and what webmasters and designers can do to ensure pages load as quickly as possible. Google is also looking at better ways for people to show their social media profiles within the Google search engine. Unfortunately the presentation isn’t recorded, you only get the slides but you can get the gist of what Google are working on at the moment.
So it looks like next year Google is going to be working its way around the web on steroids!
