One thing I have noticed is that with our home pages our first 5 blogs are displayed on the website and the text in those blogs are showing up on the second page of major keyword search and first page of searches such as Marbella property market (not a huge keyword term)
I think more people will look at doing what we have done ie displaying our last 5 blogs and 4 tweets on our home page if this trend continues.
Beginning of the year including moving the site from php to asp we had some real problems and seem to be affected more than most of our rival sites on the first page of google but now things seem to have got back to where they were with a bit of an improvement.
Caffeine has made SEO much much easier, the time between the effort you apply and its effect on rankings has shortened significantly. Links and pages are now indexed much more quickly, so i have noticed a significantly lower time for the benefits to start coming through.
Caffeine refers to their infrastructure upgrade. What hit you was probably the “Mayday Update” where they made some algorithmic adjustments to long tail keywords, possibly including going after “spammy footer links” and possibly ranking domains higher than internal pages. This was a big update and people are still figuring out what happened. Lots of big ecommerce sites complaining they lost traffic to product pages. Others are saying their conversion rates are improving.