While the upcoming roll-out of Google’s new algorithm, Caffeine, has been referred to as a change that sits “under the hood” of Google, there are certainly some very noticeable differences in SERPs between the current Google and Caffeine.
Searching for [plane tickets] reveals the results below. The left SERP is the current Google, the right SERP is Google Caffeine.
As you can see, the Caffeine results give much greater weight to large airlines than online ticket brokers. Delta ranks 3rd and American, Northwest, JetBlue, United and Southwest are not far behind. The biggest drop can be seen in Travelocity’s ranking, falling from 1st to 5th.
In another example, we compared a search for [diapers].
In this case, there is one change that we felt warranted pointing out. Huggies, a Kimberly-Clark brand, does not appear in the first ten pages of results under the current Google algorithm. However, in Google Caffeine, they are on the first page – ranked 5th.
Clearly, this is a term they would like to rank for (and probably should), and I’m sure the folks at Huggies and Kimberly-Clark will be happy to see that. However, why is there not a prevalence of more diaper brands on the first page as in the [plane tickets] example above? Where is Pampers, Luvs and other diaper brands?
As a side note for all you SEOs out there, take a look at the Huggies page that is ranking:
http://www.huggies.com/CountrySelector_Generic.aspx
Now look at a page that does not appear on the first page of results:
http://www.pampers.com/en_US/home/
Which is better optimized for the term ‘diapers’?
Clearly, Caffeine is giving a substantial boost to brand sites regardless of optimization efforts for brand and category searches.
If you’d like to test how your brand performs under the new Google Caffeine algorithm, you can use any of these tools to see side-by-side results:
http://www.facesaerch.com/caffeine/
http://www.comparecaffeine.com/
http://cartercole.com/googlevsgoogle.html
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