We get a lot of calls from people asking us to look at their sites because they have been “bitten” by Panda or Penguin. In some cases this is completely true. They either have a site that has loads of duplicate content of they hired a firm that used some unscrupulous tactics that have caused them to drop.

However, there is another reason their site could have dropped in the Google rankings and that is due to Google Caffeine and Google Freshness. In June of 2010, Google released Google Caffeine, which can be argued has had more of an effect on websites than Panda or Penguin. Google Caffeine was an update to the way Google indexes sites. This is because when you actually search Google you don’t search the web; you search Google’s index.

Google Caffeine

Prior to the change, Google had layers of indexes the were updated at different rates; with the main index being updated every few weeks. So if you ranked highly in the main index; you didn’t have to do anything to keep your new ranking because the index didn’t change very often. This is why SEO was actually pretty important. You changed a few things, added some links and BAM you were in the top ten for a long time.

Caffeine upended that SEO strategy, because now the Google index is updated in real time. As content becomes available, it can be indexed quite quickly by Google and appear in the Google search index, pushing people out of the top ten sooner rather than later as the index updates very quickly.

Google Freshness

The second change Google made is called Google Freshness. This change is related to the Page Ranking Google uses to rank websites for each search from one to infinity. The change to algorithm looks for the freshest content on a subject; so if someone Googles “NFL scores” the most recent update on NFL scores is shown. This means that a site that may not have the highest Page Rank. But, the freshest content on a subject, may be ranked higher in the results for a small amount of time.

So while Penguin and Panda may be the cause of a website dropping in the search engines, it may also be a victim of Caffeine and Freshness. This is typical of sites we have seen that have not been updated in some time. In order to maximize those search results and get ahead of others is to add more content to your site on a regular basis. This means using strategies like blogging, picture galleries, social media updates, comments and customer reviews. Websites that don’t stay fresh will slowly lose search rankings over time.