Google finally launched its Caffeine update. For those unfamiliar with updates in the SEO world: Google traditionally launches a major change every two years, with a name seemingly chosen at some late-night Google engineers’ meeting.  These updates typically strike fear into the hearts of SEO engineers because they might shift the focus of the algorithm, resulting in major losses in rankings for sites that aren’t prepared.  Here’s a basic explanation of what happened with Caffeine:

The first and most important thing to remember is Caffeine is not an algorithm update, so rankings will not be directly affected by this change. Rather, it changes (1) the speed at which Google can crawl and index information to make it available to users in search results and (2) the amount of data Google can store in its index at once.

Prior to Caffeine, the Google crawling process would go as follows:

1. Googlebot crawled a site and pulled all crawled information into the Google index.
2. The newly indexed information was processed through the algorithm to determine the rank of pages for particular keywords.
3. Once this data was processed, the updated index was pushed out to hundreds of data centers in batches — a process that took over three months.

The data center you hit when you enter a search into Google is dependent on where you sit in the world and the load that a data center is currently experiencing. That’s why it’s said that SEO recommendations take up to three months to show results.

With the Caffeine update, Google is able to process indexed information through the algorithm and push it out to all data centers almost instantly.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that pages are being crawled more quickly — just that Google is able to get webpage updates out to all data centers more quickly.

The second focus of Caffeine is on storage capabilities. User-generated content has skyrocketed over the past two years, which became a problem for Google since there was so much more info to crawl and index. The update has increased storage capabilities so Google can index more information. Information can be as basic as a new web page or attribution to a page of credit for incoming links. The attribution model for links hasn’t changed. Google is just able to store more information for a longer time now.

Since this isn’t an algorithm update and there isn’t a ranking benefit, there is nothing in your optimization efforts that needs to change. The benefit to Razorfish clients is that updates will be processed almost instantaneously, so results of optimizations should show more quickly than before. Improved storage capabilities also increases the value of smart optimizations, as it gives Google a better view of interconnections among linked sites.