Google Caffeine is now officially online.

Google announced late Tuesday that their new search index called Caffeine is live. Google has been beta testing the new search index since last year. Google’s head of their Webspam teamMatt Cutt’s gave a bit more information on what to expect from the Caffeine update. He’s been quite a vital insider voice for the Internet Search industry. He often posts on his personal blog (not Google’s) various tidbits of info about how to better structure websites to gain the most results from Organic Search. Organic meaning a typical everyday user, types in a search keyword term & Google offers what according to it’s algorithms are the best results.

Google often updates it’s search algorithms on how it ranks pages to provide the most relevant content. The Caffeine update is the most significant update in quite some time and it is to the actual web index, not to the ranking algorithms.

Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for Web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of Web content we’ve offered

What does this mean for the average user? In people speak this means that Google has accelerated it’s indexing of the Internet. Before, there was a gap between when a website updated or added content and the content showed up in Google’s index to be found by a users search keywords.

Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before

What does this mean for websites? This means that your content is going to have to make way for other sources of information that Google deems relevant to a users search keywords. So rather than only competing with other websites, your content will be competing with real time social media posts.

Forgive the horrible screen shot. Click on the picture to enlarge it. It is hard to see but the top results are fresh content that was updated 2 hours earlier. Then comes blog posts. After that is pictures and finally video.

Over at Search Engine Land Vanessa Fox had an interview with Matt Cutt’s regarding websites ranking. This is good news for SEO experts if it is entirely true. It means that if your website(s) are currently correctly optimized there is nothing for you to do in order to enjoy your same rankings.

Matt Cutts told me (Vanessa Fox) “It’s important to realize that caffeine is only a change in our indexing architecture. What’s exciting about Caffeine though is that it allows easier annotation of the information stored with documents, and subsequently can unlock the potential of better ranking in the future with those additional signals.”

Read more about the new Caffeine search index on the official Google blog.

We are beginning to test the new index because we are always a tad skeptical when someone says “relax, don’t worry”. We have yet to discover how the new changes effect search rankings. When we find out more we will post our findings. We do know that our previous advice to business owners and clients to start getting more involved in social media outlets is more important than ever to their online presence.