After the Google Caffeine sandbox website was removed yesterday, leaving users of this site with the message “Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center”, speculation was rife amongst the SEO community that the Google Caffeine update was due to go live imminently, with potentially large scale ramifications for webmasters in the run up to Christmas.
It has now been announced by Matt Cutts, a prominent Google engineer, that this will for the time being only be rolled out to one datacentre. This means that a small number of searchers are likely to be getting results returned by Google Caffeine on a Google.com search. Matt says that this is to allow them to continue to collect data and improve the technology further.
I think that this is a wise move from Google, although in many respects I am keen to see this live as soon as possible. However, as Matt rightly comments, the Christmas season is one that can cause stress for webmasters, and after past experiences, Google want to minimise the problems for most webmasters by delaying this until after the holiday season.
So, we know there is a big Google update coming, and we now have a rough idea of when it is going to happen and we just have to make sure we are ready for it now!
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