To all SEO professionals. INCOMING ! ! ! !

Maybe you've been using Google for more than a search engine for these past several years. If you are a website owner, or an SEO consultant, it's pretty likely you also use Google to measure a website's prominence, to act as a benchmark on the pecking order against the competition.

Well, the rules and standards that determine that pecking order will be changing... Actually it is always changing, but for the first time in several years, a change is coming that could have more than a subtle effect on the mighty Google SERPs (search engine result pages). Whether it will affect your website(s) or not is yet to be seen.

Google has been working on something they call Caffeine, and unlike Microsoft's caterpillar to butterfly transformation that resulted in Bing, Caffeine won't likely result in an obvious change to the Google interface we all know and love, instead, the changes are under the hood, so to speak.

In short, it's faster. In some of my tests up to %50 faster.. WHOA!!! %50 faster? Yes %50 faster, which raises the question, how did they make such a dramatic performance increase without simplifying the pecking order rules. Has the mighty Google algorithm been whittled down to bare essentials? Since I'm not a Google engineer, I can't say, but on the other hand, if I were a Google engineer, and told you, I'd have to kill you.

So what does this mean to you? Well, it may have absolutely no impact on your website's position in SERPs, but some may be affected, and I'm guessing, that change would be more than the occasional small 1-2 spot variation we all see from time to time. So, I can only suggest, we all duck and cover. That is to say, avoid any drastic SEO related tweaks until you know how your website is affected.

You can get a sneak peek, but please be aware, Caffeine is still under the knife, and could be further adjusted, so I suggest simply monitoring, not reacting, until Caffeine has been finalized.