Google’s much anticipated search engine algorithm update is planned for imminent release. Codenamed Caffeine, the question on many people’s lips is how will the new Caffeine search system affect the way that their site is indexed and listed on Google. What are the implications for Internet marketing and are there any aspects to caffeine that might make you change the way in which your website should be designed or marketed?

First and foremost – what is Caffeine?

The Caffeine update is largely ‘under the hood’. Most changes won’t be seen directly by users and apply only to technical aspects of Google’s search criteria. The front end of the engine looks the same with the back end re-engineered to index new content faster and reduce the time between new content being published online and it then appearing as a search result. Partially as a response to the evolution of Microsoft’s Bing there are a number of aspects that Google are focusing on as they strive to stay ahead of the search game.

Caffeine works on the four main pillars of search value to boost its power – search speed, accuracy, timeliness and reach.

In the pursuit of speed, Google is turning its attention to page load times.

Historically page load speed hasn’t been a factor in Google ratings but many people are now starting to consider visitor experience in terms of speed and Google will be rewarding sites that load quickly and penalise those that take a long time to load.

It makes sense and in many ways it’s surprising that Google has taken as long as it has to recognise the importance of load time. Put simply – slow loading sites frustrate and annoy visitors who then choose to go elsewhere for their search results and even using Adwords, if your site is slow, will influence the amount you end up paying.

To help wed developers and website owners Google themselves have set up a test area code.google.com/speed. There is a range of tools there that enable you to review and revise you page load performance, identify optimal load orders, Java script reuse and generally improve rankability with cleaner better optimised code.

Take a look or get your Internet marketing /SEO team to check out the Firefox extension Page Speed, webpagetest.org or the Javascript compiler Closure for ideas on how to improve performance.

Make it quick and make it clean to rank high on Google in 2010.