But is it Fairtrade?

So caffeine is bad for you. Google Caffeine that is. Certainly if judged by the lost productivity in the SEO and Webmaster communities that I reckon has happened since the announcement of its impending roll-out.

Back in August 09, Google formally unveiled its new search infrastructure code-named ‘Caffeine’ and, since then, jungle drums have been pounding; not too loud at first but in the past few weeks they’ve reached fever pitch.

The recent jittery behaviour is the result of two near-simultaneous announcements: the first when Google took away its Caffeine sandbox – the place where SEOs came to play and try to work out if they were about to start losing clients – the second was a swift follow-up statement to the missing sandbox by Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Search Spam and chief spokesperson:

‘[Google’s] ready to move from the developer preview to the next stage of the roll out: going live with Caffeine at one data center…I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays.’

‘Anxious around this time of year’, a nod there to Google’s ‘Florida’ algorithm update of December 2003 that trashed rankings and had the SEO community in tears…

So we now had a date for the general roll-out of Caffeine: after Christmas 2009. Cue much internet chatter and twitterverse 140-character ramblings and caffeine-related links (usually to the same handful of news items).

Though full-on Caffeine won’t be coming to a Google data centre near you until the New Year, that hasn’t stopped SEOs fervently trying to find that one pre-Xmas Caffeine data centre that Cutts referred to. Even if they do find it, it’s likely to be a mash of old and Caffeine results.

So what is Google Caffeine?

Building a search index and serving the results on the scale that Google has requires a huge amount of computational power and storage; the exponential growth in the number of web pages isn’t going to go away, Bing has big G in its sights and Google knows that it has to make a significant upgrade to its infrastructure in order to keep pace and remain competitive.

So, Caffeine is a sheer performance update and a serious overhaul of the Google search engine – its Google’s ‘next-generation’ search architecture built on top of its ‘next-generation’ storage, Google File System 2 (GFS2), that will underpin all its online services for the foreseeable future. It’s a fundamental change in how Google will index web pages and retrieve them in response to search queries.

Que Sera Sera

Caffeine’s a pretty big deal then but, as has been stated by Google many times over, it’s a behind the scenes update and not a ‘Florida-like’ change to the search algorithm that determines which results to serve up. But that doesn’t mean the search results won’t change. According to Cutts when pushed on the impact of Caffeine:

‘Such a big change is likely to upset some rankings but Google has been aiming to get the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) in reasonable alignment.’

Hmm, one man’s ‘reasonable alignment’ is another man’s dropped ranking. Clearly there will be some differences in the search results:  Google search is a huge distributed-beast, Caffeine is an ambitious update and, erm, humans are involved. Also, if a benefit of Caffeine is more pages indexed that has to mean more competition for the SERPs so I’d expect rankings to fluctuate.

Follow the clues

While everyone is trying to beat the pack and find out which is the first data centre Caffeine will pop-up on, it’s worth re-iterating that it’s a performance update; it’s not meant to shake up the SERPS. Sure there are bound to be some SEO casualties but it won’t be another Florida unless Google completely screws up.

So where should you invest your time in preparation? Matt Cutts gives us a clue in a recent video interview when he talks about site speed i.e. how quickly pages load, as possibly being an additional quality signal for Google for its SERPs. He states that:

‘maybe fast sites should get a little bit of a bonus [in the SERPS]…if you have a really awfully-slow site then, maybe, users don’t want that as much’

You think, Matt? I’m sure he was trying not to say ‘penalty’ there …

For some time now Google has used landing page load time as a factor in its AdWords quality score but speed has not been a factor in its organic results. That seems to be about to change with Caffeine and Google has made available some nifty testing & optimisation tools that you should check out: Google Page Speed and Google Closure for JavaScript.

Time for a nice cup of Earl Grey.