Yesterday we reported that the Google Caffeine index is launching right before the holiday season. I wrote my post like that, simply because I was in shock to see this being rolled out, even “slowly” before the holiday season. Honestly, I believe this took Google’s Matt Cutts by surprise as well. While on vacation/work in Las Vegas, Matt wrote a blog post explaining this will not be launched on more than one data center prior to the holiday season.

Again, this is not fully rolling out until after the holiday season. Thank you Matt.

Matt also broke his one year streak of not posting at WebmasterWorld, with a post in the Caffeine WebmasterWorld thread yesterday saying:

I probably stressed a few people out with my original post. But we needed clarification and we got it. Personally, I think this all came to a shock to many of the folks at Google Webmaster Central and Matt Cutts but it should not be an issue for most online retailers until after the holidays. Even then, Google hopes the search results are somewhat transparent to searchers and webmasters.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Sphinn.