So Google has unleashed their Caffeine index on us and well Bing and Yahoo who were already well behind in the game just got further behind. My perspective is always to look at the SEO effects of changes at a local South African level. Yahoo has been in the game for a long time but still fail to deliver something to even remotely satisfy anyone in South Africa.

Lets take an example of one of my South African clients with a website targeting South Africa only,webmaster tools sitemap submission done 2 months ago, about 100 recognized inbound links, and climbing.

• Google:
  • pages indexed: 200
  • Visits/mo: 600
• Yahoo:
  • pages indexed: 150
  • Visits/mo: 3
• Bing:
  • pages indexed: 50
  • Visits/mo: 8

Pages indexed gives an idea of how easy/difficult it is to get content into these search engines, but the visits? There are South Africans who use these search engines but the quality of results. Where the other search engines fail is in delivering search results relevant to locals. While there have been criticisms of Google news lagging in local news content the revised index should update faster.

The above number of visitors from Bing and Yahoo is the result of low search volumes but the poor local relevancy is a significant factor. Searching on this client’s brand name on Google gives me position #1, on Yahoo I get #5 and on Bing #3. Old index or new index Google still wins local searchers with local weighted indexed content, if this is going to get better, great!