The question on everyone’s lips in the SEO world at the moment is ‘where is Google Caffeine’? Announced in August, Caffeine was described as a large-scale change to the Google infrastructure and, naturally, there would be some testing required. In this regard, Google took the unprecedented step of allowing developers access to a sandboxed version of the algorithm so that they could test their results and positions. Many SEO specialists reported better results in the sandbox and were waiting with bated breath for it to go live and Matt Cutts wrote a blog post in November claiming that “the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays”.
So where is it?
We’re coming to the end of February and Caffeine still isn’t live across all data centres – in fact, it’s still only on one, the same as it was before Christmas, only now Google won’t let anyone know which IP it’s on. A spokesman for Google told Search Engine Land this week that they ‘expect to roll it out to all data centres over the coming months’, which is certainly a different tale than Matt Cutts was telling in November.
The fact that Google now won’t tell people which data centre Caffeine is live on certainly heightens the mystery, and there are still regular strange fluctuations in Google’s SERPs, which is leading to a lot of speculation throughout the industry. Google’s spokesperson had this to say on the data centre issue: ‘The data centre remains the same’, they said, ‘but different IP addresses can map to different data centres at different times due to how Google manages its traffic. Because of how Google employs custom load-balancing, there is not a single IP address that will always reach the Caffeine data centre. For example, one IP address might still send half of its traffic to the Caffeine data centre and half of its traffic to a different data centre’.
Again, this is different to what was said in November, when users were directed to 209.85.225.103 on which Caffeine was purported to be live 50% of the time, which may well not be the case today. Either way, Caffeine isn’t live for all data centres yet and it could be months before it is and although it’s in the wild on one data centre, Google are being very cagey about where you can find it. Draw from that what you will.
Related posts: