The Search Engine Optimisation industry has been waiting with bated breath for the new Google update, nicknamed ‘Caffeine’. As we discussed back in September, Google’s results have been fluctuating a great deal as the update has been worked on and though they seem to be on their way to stabilising, the sooner ‘Caffeine’ goes live the better, for developers, SEO’s and users alike.
Developers have been able to preview ‘Caffeine’ in a sandbox since August and for the most part, the results have been encouraging. When the sandbox tool was closed yesterday, the natural assumption was that the updated algorithm would be going live very soon.
Following this, a blog post by Matt Cutts told us that ‘Caffeine’ would, unfortunately, not be going completely live until ‘after the holidays are over’ and in a follow up comment, he stated that he meant Christmas rather than the American holiday of Thanksgiving, which is coming up soon.
All is not lost though: the newly updated Google will be going live on one datacentre after another over the next couple of months so there is the possibility that you will have access to ‘Caffeine’ sooner rather than later, benefiting from the faster and more accurate results the update promises.
Google rolling their latest update out slowly and gradually rather than dropping it wholesale gives them time to collect feedback and squash any bugs which may arise when it goes live, and will also minimise the strain that the update puts on webmasters and search engine optimisation specialists over the holiday period.
Though it’s slightly disappointing that we’re going to have to wait for our ‘Caffeine’ fix, we now have a much clearer idea of when it’s going live than we did just a couple of days ago, which is definitely encouraging news for webmasters, developers and search engine optimisation specialists, as well as much of Google’s user base.
Related posts: