Mayday and Caffeine – Two Google Projects That Changed Your Decision From “If” To “When”

Mayday – a distress signal used to signify an emergency and need for help

Caffeine – something I use to give myself a boost quite regularly

Seem like harmless words that have nothing in the world to do with B2B social media and content marketing, right? Think again.

In recent weeks, Google completed two rather significant changes; one, Mayday, is related to how Google handles search queries and the other, Caffeine, deals with how Google indexes the web. If you are outside the world of search engines, the only Google changes you may have noticed over the past couple of weeks were either the Google Pacman doodle or the day Google choose to be like Bing.

However, Mayday and Caffeine have meaningful impacts on search results, both from a relevance and real-time perspective that in my mind further solidify the need for you to begin participating in B2B social media and content marketing.

The question is no longer, “if we should get started?” but, “when will our B2B social media and content marketing strategy be completed and ready for execution?”

Without getting technical, I’ll do my best to highlight the changes and why this is important to you as a B2B marketer, who may be either struggling with the B2B social media decision yourself, or working to gain executive buy-in for your B2B social media strategy.

MAYDAY

Think; search quality. Think; provide users a better search experience by improving results through better matching of websites with user’s search queries.

The project was completed by Google’s search quality team and is independent of Caffeine. A wee bit of technical talk – it is a change to Google’s algorithm – i.e. the code that determines the relevance and ranking of a page. It was rolled out April 28^th – May 3^rd (around May 1^st – hence the name – credit to Webmasterworld).

It’s been tested, and there is no turning back. This is a permanent change.

Here’s Google’s Matt Cutts with an explanation:

CAFFIENE

Think; search timeliness. Think; provide users a better search experience by improving results through providing the freshest, most recently published content about the user’s search query.

This project was completed in an effort to better enable Google to handle the increasing amount of content (video, images, news, blog posts, etc) that is being published every minute and make more of it available as close to possible when it is published.

An excerpt, from the June 8^th article, Our new search index: Caffeine on The Official Google Blog.

Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. 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. 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.

Why it matters to you as a B2B marketer

Mayday and Caffeine is Google’s way of telling us that quality, relevant, real-time content is what matters to their users (and your buyers) and content published today is far more meaningful to their users (and your buyers) then content published months if not years ago.

Kinda makes you think about your static HTML website that was last updated a few years ago, no? Adds a bunch of weight to the need to be producing regular, ongoing content too, right?

If or When

That’s the question. I think you know my answer, what’s yours?