With so much emphasis on search engine optimization (SEO) in recent years, companies have worked hard to get their keywords to rank high in SERPs, but will all that be for naught if Google adds "Caffeine?"
On their company blog, Mike Dobbs and Martha Mukangara of 360i write that a change to Google’s Caffeine would "substantially" affect search rankings for keywords.
By comparing 40 retail keywords in Google "Decaf" versus the beta version of Google Caffeine, 360i found that there was about a 15 percent shift in first page rankings.
There also appears to be more relevance placed on Universal results, meaning that SERPs will contain more instances of videos, news, images, books, blogs and local search results, according to 360i.
When looking at the Universal results from Caffeine, it appears that an increasing emphasis is being put on news. 360i notes that currently news makes up about 1 percent of web listings but in Caffeine, news jumps to 5 percent.
Since it was first introduced earlier this month, SEOs have argued that Caffeine will mark a dramatic change in rankings if it were to go live. In a post for PC World, David Coursey called Caffeine "potentially a very big deal" for businesses that rely on their search rankings in Google.
