Google Caffeine Update Coming Up, Watch Out

Hey there fellow bloggers, money-makers or just internet users,
I’m definite you’re among the mass internet population that uses Google. If you don’t know yet, then please get to know that I love Google a lot.[sarcasm] After all it has done for me through it services, it has given me a head start in my online ventures[/sarcasm].
Jokes apart, I really think that Google is a great service and sends a lot of traffic to my website which makes it even better. So, this news has been surrounding the SEO community for a while and I just got to know about it a week ago.
Google’s officials have told that Google will be updating their search engine algorithms in the new update called ‘Caffeine’. In fact, this has been around since August and Google was kind enough to give a test of the caffeine run data center for us to check the difference on.
Well, they’ve taken it down now (sorry guys) but there would definitely be a few things for us to keep up on for good search results in 2010. I would highly recommend you to check out Matt Cutt’s blog post on this which includes a video explanation about it too. Or, you can view the video below:

For the record, this is going to be the biggest Google update after the post 2005 or early 2006 ‘big daddy’ update. While we can just expect for the search engine result pages to maintain the listings of our websites, such a thing might not be the case because Google had a total re-architecture built and lot of things changed.
Matt Cutts says that they tried their best to keep the Google index as it is. He also says that the results wouldn’t change so much and the average google searcher would not even notice the changes.
The power user, however, will notice some changes which is Google’s self-proclaimed ‘increase in search quality’. If you’re interested in knowing a few guesses which I think might be playing a big part in the coming up Caffeine update, then you can read on.

Internal links will have a little less effect

Unlike previously, according to some tests I put on the Caffeine sandbox, I noticed that pages that were highly dependant on internal links (links to a page from within the site) had a little negative change in their rankings.

Social media will play the BIGGEST part

It is still my guess, but I think that soon the ‘linking game’ in google’s algorithms will decrease in weightage over time. We all know that it is quite tough to game websites like digg, stumbleupon, etc. and this can be used by Google to it’s advantage.
When a website gets 500+ diggs it is obvious that this website is trustable and has good content. So I noticed a few results up on the demo Caffeine engine that seemed to be driven by social media backing.
Well, these are my guesses for the changes that might take place. I’m pretty sure that the changes will prove useful for the ‘white-hat’ seo-ers out there and I would definitely like to hear some stuff from the black hatters as well.