Recently, Google has undergone a behind the scenes upgrade to improve their infrastructure being referred to as “Caffeine.” The goals behind this change are to make searches faster, more accurate, and increase the relevance of results. In the early stages of what should take months to fully develop, the faster speed is most notable, but the number of search results offers the biggest clues into what is to come.

Using the tool www.CompareCaffeine.com, you can look at side-by-side results for both regular Google, and the new “Caffeine” version. To unravel what the impact of the upgrade could be, I tried a number of searches to compare both speed and number of results. In each case I ran the search three times and recorded the differences. My searches were for “insurance,” “car insurance,” and “cheap car insurance for ford mustang.”

From the above results, the most noticeable difference is the speed. “Caffeine” returned results in about half the time in all three tests. As for volume, it appears that the longer the keyword the more relevant the results became based on the number of listings returned. While “Caffeine” returns more results than regular Google for a generic search on “insurance,” when I refine what I’m looking for, they produce less results.

What does this mean for affiliates?
It appears that the space for long-tail keywords will become smaller, but more targeted. Displaying in the first few pages has always been important, but if the focus is going to be on relevance, make sure you are adding unique value to an insurance shopper’s visit. There has been an increase in penalties for simple redirect sites recently, and it may be time to develop your content to add value and justify being ranked higher.

So what can you do?
InsureMe offers a product for affiliates in our top two tiers allowing them to host the form on their site to avoid such penalties. If interested, talk to your affiliate manager about ways you can increase lead volume to enjoy the benefits of being in this group.