SEO News: Real Time Search, Google Caffeine & Site Hierarchy Displayed in Search Results

As the year comes to an end, there is a lot of SEO News coming down the pipe that will affect your search results (and your rankings) in 2010. We’ll take a look at all three of the major search updates including Google Caffeine, Real Time Search and the new site hierarchies that are being displayed in Google search results…

Google Caffeine was set to roll out with the New Year, just after the holidays. This is basically a new version of Google that will increase size, indexing speed, accuracy, etc. Matt Cutts explains Google Caffeine in this video:

I haven’t yet read anything definitive on how this may affect SEO, if at all, but will definitely keep my ear to the ground. For now it’s safe to say that good site structure, quality content and relevant inbound links are still the key.

As Matt mentions in the video, the Caffeine update will allow Google to handle the power and speed of Real Time Search…

Real Time Search

Real Time Search is probably the biggest and most exciting update for most online marketers, though Rand Fishkin predicts it will fade away in 2010.

Google describes it as a way to discover breaking news on the web with real-time updates from news, blogs and social networks. They put out this video earlier this month to demonstrate Real Time Search results:

What does this mean to you? As a marketer, you can now easily trump the current top results with a simple tweet or a new blog post… This is huge.

Tweets are showing up in Google search within minutes, if not seconds.

If you are not already actively blogging and using Twitter & Facebook, now would be the time to start. Now as in right now

Site Hierarchy Displayed in Search Results

Last month Google announced that site hierarchies would be displayed in SERPs, to help searchers see relevant information about each individual result.

This is similar to what we call breadcrumb navigation on websites. Here is an example given by Google:

What does this mean for you? Take some time to examine your site structure. Use categories to group micro-topics (or sets of products) on your blog or website, and make sure your categories are descriptive.

Best,