This week Google confirmed that the much speculated upon Caffeine Update has finished and is here to stay. This new search index has been hot gossip around the interweb for quite some time now. There’s some confusion about what current changes are related to Caffeine and which are down to an unrelated algo adjustment over at Google HQ which has been referred to as the “Mayday” update.

With that in mind, I thought I’d do a bit of a post about what’s happening, who it’s happening to, how its impacted me personally and include a bit of wild conjecture about how affiliates will be affected for entertainment value.

So What Is Google Caffeine?

Fortunately Google saw fit to release a concise diagram which explains it all.

Clearly the forecast for Google searchers is cloudy with a chance of  cyclonic outbursts of random information and images.  Do please use the new index with caution if searching in an enclosed space, or a subject area with sharp edges.

*ahem*

Alternatively it could be that the above indicates that users can now enjoy the following: -

• The new index will be continuously updated, and will deliver fresh content faster than ever.  Delays between the time Google finds new content and includes it in the index have been eradicated.
• Google can now index staggering amounts of data, giving them the ability to add more all singing and dancing features to their search engine offerings.
• Real time web here we come!!

Changes to Longtail Search – Caffeine or Mayday?

• Current site ranking changes being experienced by some webmasters aren’t related to Google caffeine. Apparently they’ve just been rolled out together and current traffic changes are just part of one of the many hundreds of updates the big G makes every year. Well, that’s what Matt Cutts said anyhow.  So caffeine = quicker search, Mayday = quality adjustments.
• The changes are based around a re-assessment of how the best quality pages to rank for long tail searches are determined.
• Until now, the internal pages of many large sites with good authority were ranked well for long tail searches. We’ve all seen these results in the SERPS and greeted them with a wry “Urgh, these guys have such good authority they can put any old shit up and rank for it”.  The changes mean that this authority will now no longer be enough to make Google believe sites are the best quality match to be returned for long tail searches.
• Most likely to be affected are large sites with many internal pages which are buried deep within a site’s structure and which don’t attract much in the way of external links and aren’t terribly well linked to from within the site either. The buzz around internet town is that ecommerce sites are most likely to be affected.
• The pages containing  individual products on ecommerce sites fit the above profile and also often do not contain unique content, and may be populated by descriptions and information from manufacturers databases.  i.e. duplicate content. There have been lots of reports from hard hit merchants verifying this.

So How Does This Affect Affiliates?

I can only speak for my own sites with any sort of surety, but I seem to have fallen heir to a lot of long tail traffic since the start of May.  For example, my mens underwear site has had a 25% increase in traffic and my lingerie site is enjoying a boost of 30%. Some of this is attributable to swimwear and holiday season, but I’m definately seeing a sudden glut of longtail traffic and an increase in the number of search phrases referring traffic to my sites. Happy days for me (touch wood!)

I’d have thought I might fall victim to the “isolated page with poor linkage” syndrome with many of my blog posts, particularly on Lingerie Brands which has had terrible linkage between blog post pages up until about 10 days ago when I finally got the site sorted with a pagination plugin. However, it seems that the unique content on these pages combined with the internal cross linkage from related posts has been enough to give Google a good “quality signal” about my content.

And It’s Really All About The Signals Baby…

I have read nothing about affiliate sites being affected, but I imagine there are a few that could fall victim to the current changes. Sites heavily reliant upon feeds and not adding value through the addition of unique and compelling content could very well be affected.  Perhaps voucher code and offer sites that pull in and publish feed based content without any alteration could see a reduction in Google’s willingness to rank their pages well. If you auto generate content, it may well be search engine brown trouser time.  And of course, there’ll be the usual outbreak of innocent bystanders who have done absolutely nothing wrong, just to add the appropriate levels of confusion to the mix

Feed affiliates and those using automated methods to build sites could be on a sticky wicket with this, but I think a lot of affiliates could use these changes to their advantage. If you’re prepared to put in the time and effort to create a well structured, content rich, and unique site you’ll have a much better chance now of getting valuable long tail traffic to your site that was previously being hoovered up by large sites you were unable to compete with.

It’s going to be a bit like dating I reckon.  If you can give the right quality signals with your website’s “body language”, there’s every chance Google will hook you up with a red hot love match in the form of some beautiful traffic.

Further Reading

Google Confirms Mayday Update Impacts Longtail -  from Searchengineland.

Webmasterworld Disaster Thread – lots of people chat about how their sites have been affected.

Google Sends the Long Tail Screaming for May-Day by Kieran Flanagan

Official Google Blog on caffeine update

This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK

Have You Been Google Caffeinated or is it Mayday?