Google Caffeine (kaffein) Index Update Arrives at last or does it?

This Easter-break period of (soi disant ) nothing-much-happening … finds the Interweb awash with teasing tales of Google’s will-she-won’t-she much-trailed Caffeine roll-out finally arriving! Some of the men-who-claim-to-know are coming out of their bunkers and proclaiming it to be de facto happening.

As always, Google’s SEO panjandrum Matt Cutts gets a name-check in here too (well he would ) with reference being made to a statement he’d previously made about Caffeine happening on April 1 … now being edited to read, ” … things are on track though, and we expect to roll out Caffeine to all data centers in the coming weeks/months“.

Cutts had also said previously, “The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there … (it’s) … a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits ‘under-the-hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.”

Well that may indeed end up being the case, but back then, it appeared to us … that statement had sounded a teensy-weensy bit like something designed so as not to scare the horses … you know like they did way back when their unannounced, infamous Florida update blew away almost everybody in SERPs: talk about SEO ending up in Hurricane Country!

But there’s no doubt something’s going on at the Big ‘G’ at the moment (# see update 9th April below): rumours usually start to emerge from West Coast USA and sweep eastwards … here’s some snippets from the forums:

• 5:27 pm on Mar 31, 2010: I am seeing a lot of movement today in the SERP’s. Keep in mind this does not look like caffeine in any way, but this is the most shuffling I have seen all year. The SERP’s have changed 3 times today as far as I can tell. A competitor who has ranked #3 for a term for the last year+ has dropped to #5. Lots of movement going on
• 6:32 pm on Mar 31, 2010: Huge movement in the west coast. Am seeing caffeine in the LA area. East cost is showing it as well..
• 6:41 pm on Mar 31, 2010: We are getting big changes, caff. in the east coast as well, back to where we were 2 weeks ago or so… A big step in the right direction, but not perfect yet…

There was also something we noted yesterday that’s reflected in this forum note: “ Ooh! Anyone else seeing lots of snippets being URl only even though there is a web page there? The #1 ranking for one of my terms just went URl only (very weird seeing URl only ranking #1!) but that site has ranked at #1 for nearly 2 years — bet they are wetting themselves tonight seeing themselves listed URl only despite not having change their page or allows! Glitch or indication? ”

We saw this happening throughout the day on 1st April for many sites in our own keyphrase tracking regime, but we weren’t sure whether it was the boys at The Chocolate Factory having an April Fool’s Day gag … ‘cos at the same time they were showing their speed-of-results returned as not in ‘secs‘ as usual but at ‘warp-speed’.  You know how those Mountain View Googler’s enjoy a bit of a wheeze!

So what do we know? All we can honestly reflect is that, as a touchstone, we tend to most-closely track our own website and marquee keyphrase Web Design Northampton and we’ve managed to stay constantly at the No. 1 position for that keyphrase throughout all of this: so maybe the Cutts’ view is correct and there is no difference post-Kaffein.  There are many who hold to the view that Google wants to impose a beat-down on practitioners of SEO – but we don’t subscribe to that!  We’ve long opined that ethical SEO is perfectly complementary to everything that Google holds dear and that if your raison d’etre is aligned to the Google Guidelines, then you won’t go far awry. Make a long-term investment in your website: use keywords and semantic keyphrases appropriate to your market segment, acquire themed links to improve link popularity and write content aimed at human readers … it’s that easy.  But it does take time: if you’re setting out to gain Google Top 10 position … it may take a while: incremental growth is the name of the organic game.

As far as real Caffeine-is-here-evidence goes … we have very little, in truth. But sharing what little we do have may be helpful: there’s certainly been evidence of recent Googlebot hyper-activity. Like, on average we get 8 x Googlebot visits per day (historically) and we can report a significant upsurge in Googlebot visits in January & February 2010 to the level of 18 per day on average: but it’s now returned back to the typical average. So that may indeed be evidence that ‘G’ was girding up its loins earlier this year for a Caffeine/Kaffein roll-out in April?

By the way, the name-change to Kaffein,  isn’t another April Fool … it’s (allegedly) Google’s reaction to some complaint about their choice of the word Caffeine and that being offensive to some ( you couldn’t make that up now – could you?).

So watch this space and when we’ve got something more to report … then *report it we will!

# memo 9th April 2010: it now appears that at least one of the  ‘somethings‘ that was going on over Easter weekend … was the roll-out of a Google Tool Bar Page Rank (TBPR) update!  That’s not to say that they weren’t also Kaffein-ing at the same time: just that  we’re more confident in reporting the Easter TBPR update, in that we know what they look like.

* memo 23rd April 2010:  extract from an updated WebmasterWorld thread from Senior member, ‘whitenight’ said:

For the UNOFFICIAL record, I’m calling Caffeine UNOFFICIALLY launched.
Why?
** It’s on 80% of all DCs.
The remaining 20% have been getting Caff datasets flickering for the past 24-48 hours.
The “old” SERPs and Algo are now the minority.
** At the time, I couldn’t be bothered to post and then argue with the masses,
but the INFRASTRUCTURE (NOT datasets) has been fully live and operational for ALL DCs for about a week and half now.
since testing the INFRASTRUCTURE is far more complicated than observing datasets, you’ll forgive me if i don’t give any practical examples… other than pointing out i’ve given past examples of how ANYONE can do this on their own in the earliest Caff threads.

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