EQUTE — It makes sense that Google’s upcoming Caffeine update will likely emphasize speed.

Google has already made load time a factor in AdSense quality scores but the purported addition the feature in all Google search is new and could mean big changes to a lot of publishers.

The guys over at WebProNews interviewed Google’s Matt Cutts about the possibility.

Google has a lot of clout on the Internet, obviously, but they cannot control the speed. Matt Cutts said it himself, they want a faster Internet. So this is one way to push site owners to speed things up without hurting sites that can’t speed things up.

Anyone looking to test their site before Caffeine rolls out after the holidays should check out Google’s page speed test. Testing loading speed should be a no-brainer to most site owners, but now it’s even more essential to make sure the site is running on all cylinders.

EQUTE — Google is set to release the new search update dubbed Caffeine, Google has taken down the Caffeine sandbox and left a nice little note.

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.
Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Matt Cutts wrote a blog posting easing fears for everyone who depends on search for their livelihood.

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. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.

Many will remember the infamous Florida Update in 2003. It also came around the holidays, but early in the holiday season, causing many sites to lose traffic during the shopping season.

So it is certainly nice, it could have been a real disaster for a lot of people if their sites were suddenly on page three when the holiday shoppers were looking to buy.

There has been a lot of speculation about what Google Caffeine will do to search rankings — will it be the Google slap-apocalypse?

Most likely, no.

The people at WebProNews sat down with Matt Cutts from Google to examine the issue. You can watch the video at WebProNews.

His main points were that most people won’t notice a change when Google Caffeine rolls out. He also made a point to say that it would be rolled out slowly and would be tweaked based on user feedback.

At the core, Google Caffeine is only an update to how Google actually crawl’s Web sites, so there should be no quality-score adjustment that could hurt online marketers.

From the article:

This infrastructure modification will lay the foundation for future indexing changes and will also allow for the expansion of website speed and size. Incidentally, it could even provide a stronger architecture for potential real-time and semantic efforts.

Google Caffeine could be laying the framework for the upcoming Google Wave.