What Affect Will Google Caffeine Have on Automotive SEO?
Automotive SEO is a rapidly changing discipline. This is evidenced by the changes in the works at Google, now in beta, with Google Caffeine. These changes will affect how you need to market your dealership now and in the future.
For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. – Google’s Webmaster Central Blog August 10th, 2009
One of the most noticeable changes with their new initiative is index size. There will be many more sites competing for your money keywords.
With the larger number of results produced it would appear that Google.com search engineers are mastering index build based on Latent Semantic Indexing, which will allow the search engine to return results based on keywords and phrases that conceptually mean the same thing.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text. LSI is based on the principle that words that are used in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. A key feature of LSI is its ability to extract the conceptual content of a body of text by establishing associations between those terms that occur in similar contexts.
Another feature of the improvements, in the eyes of google, being made with this new initiative is “temporal relevancy” with the addition of social networking updates being returned in search engine results.
- real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic. Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results.  Official Announcement from Google
Bing is including social networking profiles and updates in their results and made the same announcement prior to Google doing so.
What does all of this mean for car dealers?
Current dealership website technology will need a major overhaul and search engine optimization will require more effort. Content production and social media interaction will soon be the driving force in marketing your dealership in organic search. Dealers will need to create multiple points of entry to their marketing funnel and this cannot be accomplished with one website.
It will take dealership blogs, social networking / media and multiple dealer microsites to maintain relevance and out pace your competition.
Regarding the Google Caffeine Update, I think Google is still scrambling to figure out how to tie social networking links with this.
The problem first started when the nofollow tag was introduced. For example, links from a Facebook or Twitter homepage are nofollow, so we know they won’t pass pagerank.
Another factor is redirects, like Faceook Posts and Twitter Tweets. If you use a bit.ly link it’s obviously a redirect, but will that pass along any relevance?
We have a twitter app that we developed, and dealers that use it get an auto tweet sent out as each vehicle is added to their inventory. Our url is on each tweet from all of the dealers.
Keep in mind, this is a simple site we recently launched. There’s barely any links pointing to it yet it is killing it in the serps. It’s mind boggling to me, so I can’t help to think it’s coming from nofollow links from Twitter, or perhaps the Facebook Redirects.
I just want to add that this is a great blog, and I pass it along to any of my clients.
Paul, I think I just gave you a new blog topic! You seem savvy, so I would love to see your take on it.
You can remove this link before approving if you’d like, but I just want to show you an example of a dealer using our Twitter app: twitter.com/usedcarsorlando