Are You Ready for Some Caffeine? Google is!

Google’s spam king, Matt Cutts, recently mentioned in his blog that Google would be implimenting its “Caffeine” update at the beginning of the new year. The new Google Caffeine search functionality will not be likely to be noticed by users, but website owners had better be paying attention.

Caffeine has been heralded as a major overhault of Google’s search engine and has been said to improve the search engine’s indexing capabilities, with improvements in speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness. The question is, are websites ready for it?

One of the first things certain website owners will notice is, their page may be missing from the search results, or it may have dropped down a few notches in the search results. The reason for that may be their site’s loading time. According to Cutts, page loading speed will be an added factor in search engine rankings in 2010. Slow loading RSS feeds, widgets, Flash applications and images may bring your site down a notch, or 200 notches, as it were. Time to re-evaluate their use on your site, at least on important pages.

Additionally, keywords will play an important role in search engine ranking, which means that keyword research will be as, if not more important than ever before, along with proper use of keywords in titles, meta tags and the content itself.

Word has it that Caffeine has already been implemented in at least one of Google’s data centers, and the toll is already being felt by some websites, particularly by sites on shared hosting servers. 2010 will begin with a white knuckle couple of months that will tell whether this “new” Google will be a help to users, but a hindrance to website developers and advertising-funded (i.e. “heavy”) websites in general.