Ok so we finally got a little time to check out Google Caffeine this morning and have been both pleased and impressed with the results with regards to general SERP quality and our portfolio.

We’d like to be able to think that the results validate our transparent by-the-book seo techniques as the majority of the sites we’ve looked so far at seem to have benefited from the caffeine update at this point.

But, whilst looking at some SEO searches for SEOIbiza we stumbled across this warrior forum post highlighting this search result screenshotted below – click for full size, and this is MASSIVE news.

Anyone who has been in SEO for even the smallest amount of time will have seen this benchmark example used to demonstrate Google’s links-rankings relationship..

..it’s the old cliche one..

“click here”

.

and it’s no longer the case!

On the left in old Google we have Adobe, who actually have sitelinks for the term, on the right, we now have Microsoft, then a domain called clickhere.com

Obviously this needs further (and major) investigation, but it looks as though it may be fair to say that Google’s utter dependence on links / anchor text for rankings is in Rehab, if not actually fully recovered.

Watch this space.