jd01 - 2:12 am on Oct 1, 2009 (gmt 0)

Thanks for letting them stay tedster.

I stumbled across them this AM and had to sit and read, because as soon as I realized what they were about and the information they presented I was blown away. IMO it's the best 'Plain English Synopsis' of what the Caffeine changes entail.

I usually only try to post links to 'official documentation' references, but there's a bunch of information there I thought it was good to share, since there seems to be sooooo much confusion about what's going on.

@aristotle

If my understanding of Caffeine is correct, it doesn't involve an algo change, but SERPs could still be affected by the fact that more data will be collected and fed into the algo. The additional data will be collected by deeper and more frequent crawling activity. It occurred to me that this could theoretically hurt the rankings of sites that depend on backlinks from high PR pages for most of their incoming link juice, but might help sites that have a lot of backlinks from low PR marginal pages.

My personal opinion is:
Yes and No.

To the best of my understanding the changes are basically an upgrade to what is largest, fastest, most robust information processing, storage and retrieval system ever created...

IOW: They took the best and are making it better.

The preceding stated, the reason I think yes and no, is because it's not like G has stopped growing it's database while still using GFS v1, so:

Yes: IMO it could theoretically hurt (or help) the rankings of *some* websites, *sooner* than they would have been affected using the current GFS.

No: IMO it will not hurt (or help) the rankings of websites, which would not have already been affected with the current GFS, at some point in time.

So, in short, my basic feeling re website rankings and the Caffeine Update is:
The Google Caffeine Update Accelerates Inevitable Rankings.