When the Mountain View boys announced the global launch of their brand new and curiously named indexing technology less than a month ago they were quick to assure the general public that their ‘search experience’ would be vastly improved.
Mainstream media lost no time adopting the party line and trumpeting faster download speeds and fresher results would be the major benefit for users of the ubiquitous search tool and any initial concerns of SEO practitioners were allayed by the search engine giant with carefully worded assurances that the underlying structure would remain wholly unchanged.
Suggestions by some sceptical industry pundits that the move was more likely driven by the competitive threats being posed by burgeoning social media giants Facebook and Twitter than any real desire to provide better search results have, for the most part, been confined to IT blogs and SEO forums.
It must be said, the promise of fresher results delivered by continuously indexing web pages as opposed to every 2-3 weeks does, at first blush, seem unlikely to be delivered without someone suffering and being relegated to the second page, or worse, of the search engine results page (SERP). See SERP below for keywords 'plumber wollongong' with not a single natural listings in sight above the fold.
There are, after all, only ten spots available on the SERP for natural (or organic) results. Natural results are the results virtually all surfers say they seek, although reputedly research shows over 40 per cent of users when asked cannot actually tell the difference between them and sponsored listings.
The ongoing erosion of available ‘free’ space is becoming problematic with the ‘sponsored’ links (read adverts such as Google AdWords) no longer being confined purely to the right hand column and now also dominating the most important space on the SERP, i.e. the top of the natural listings (the most read part) together with the introduction of Local Business Results, complete with map, usually plonked near the top of the prized natural listings.
Most times you now only get three real (natural) listings squeezed in between the top sponsored AdWord listings and the Google local business results, the other seven appearing below the map.
How the so-called free local business results are put together remains a mystery but certainly they are not compiled in the same order as true natural listings and how long they will remain free is also uncertain given that in the US trials are already underway to test price points ($US75 per month mooted for a small yellow flag).
A SEO consultant I know claims that the local business results are in some way controlled by Yellow Pages and that their good customers get preference – the oldest/best at top. I must say I have never seen any evidence of this although I am aware Yellow Pages does offer its customers help to apply for the free-to-anyone listings, and I’m pretty sure it is on the public record they did provide Google with business listings in Australia. I should point out though that anyone can currently apply for a free local business listing direct from Google.
To make matters worse, with the introduction of Caffeine the 10 vital spots are under further threat with the imposition of Twitter tweets, video images and YouTube thumbnails intermingled with buttons for additional search tools in the left hand column and suggested related links in the SERP footer.
In terms of real estate, to use the terminology of Jakob Nielsen (a pioneer in human computer interaction), the naturals now sometimes only represent about half (and not the best half) of the available space for navigation purposes; in fact it could be said Google has reverted to being a (wash your mouth out) paid directory itself, i.e. not a search engine dedicated to finding the best unpaid results/websites.
In this new and much busier SERP context most searchers are very unlikely to visit Page 2 or later and so the reliance on achieving the critical Top 10 Page 1 result is now more important for business websites than ever before.
The team at Your Online Community is closely following the impact of Google Caffeine on its 30,000+ local SMARTPAGES directory listings and will report its findings in this column as they come to hand. | 
