It seems like an absolute lifetime has passed by since Google first announced Caffeine back in August and a “sandbox” where people could test it.

We had a quick look here and made a few more Caffeinated observations here.

And everybody’s been waiting for it ever since, with a few, in fact several “is it already live?” – type false starts, but now it does actually look like it might finally be here, well more than it isn’t, anyway..

It was originally announced back in Nov 09,  it would be out “after the holidays” but apparently they meant “next Easter holiday”

Anybody who is watching the Algo’s fits and starts lately can’t help but have seen wildly differing results over the course of days, or even hours sometimes, and then one by one the WMT serpwatchers have started saying it’s here, first in the US, and then in the last week or so confirmation of arrival in the UK, Germany, US etc.

Now of course  no-one knows whether it’s to stay, or more testing that could be rolled back (as people have speculated has happened once, maybe twice before) but if you watch a lot of sites over a lot of keywords, the patterns look exactly like the “usual” big update / rollout, ie.. there are large changes on individual rankings but this is generally characterized by there (mostly) being as many large rankings gains, as losses.

It’s only at update time that you see this, when sites almost seem to “pivot” on one axis, some kws remain unmoved, but others rise, or fall, often at about 50 /50 up to down.

That’s what the sites we’ve been looking at the last week or so are all doing, so there’s definitely something going down.

Will it stay?  ..Will it ever “settle” again?  ..Time will tell.