Have you been to Google in the past few days? Of course you have. But! Have you noticed anything different about Google?

Google has just substantially changed the way they index websites. Here’s the official announcement from Google:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

This means two things for you and I -

Firstly, it means that sites regularly publishing new content will be noticed and will list higher than sites that do not change. This makes it a lot more valuable to add a blog to your site!

Secondly, and usefully, it means that Google will index new content a lot faster. That means your searches will return more recent results much faster than they did in the past. The time between a page being crawled by Google’s internal googlebots and that updated page being made available to searches has diminished substantially (minimizing cached time).  For larger sites, or for sites updating Google when they change, new results can now be visible in less than a minute!!  This is a big change from the previous methods that used to take 2 weeks – 2 months for new updates to reach search results.

So, the bottom line?  The most important message to understand is that Google has changed the rules; and as a result the entire way sites rank has changed, and it will be a while before the dust settles.  However, at least one thing is clear -  new content will be a winner in terms of ranking.  Be aware that traditional SEO techniques are very likely to not give you the results they once did.

If you’re interested in more detail, the Mashable link below gives a really useful analysis.

Check out The Age’s article on this here which includes a short video for more information.

Click here for Google’s official announcement.

Here’s a more detailed analysis on Mashable for further reading.