Google : scary BigDaddy ?

Early last month, Google began implementing a big move in its ranking algorithm and establishing new datacenter infrastructures : BigDaddy was born.

Matt Cutts, head of anti-spam group at Google, has published information about BidDaddy on its blog:

Many think that BigDaddy means there will be big changes in the Google result pages, and you should take it into consideration from a SEO point of vue.

Matt Cutts posted three SEO advices just before its bigdaddy post, so they are possibly related to the Google algorithm change: they were about url canonicalization, interpreting inurl and 302 redirects. Those redirects are used to manipulate the Google rankings. So, I imagine Google tried hard to fix related issues. But informations about Google ranking algorithm are really kept secret.

In a following post, Matt Cutts discussed the Bigdaddy progress update. The Google datacenters are migrating one by one, about one every 10 days, since February. So, all datacenter would soon have migrated to BigDaddy. If you want to hit a BidDaddy datacenter right now, you can try thoses IPs directly:

Google is incorporating user feedback (most notably feedback about webspams) for its BidDaddy upgrade. So things continue to evolve. But are the Google changes really important ? I beleive they are.

In my own little testing indeed, I saw that results on bigdaddy Google datacenter and on non-bigdaddy Google datacenters was sometimes very important (75% drop on a search like "publicityweb blog"). Some users are reporting something like a 700% drop in their Google ranking. And those are not related to 302-redirect/black-hat hacks to manipulate the Google index. Here one example of a (PR-5) webmaster losing ranks in Google. Is this called "collateral damages"?

How could you watch what's going out ? You can try to query the different Google datacenters, using their different IP addresses. Or you can use Tony Hill's BigDaddy watch service, by example. Nice work, Tony :-)

Let's hope that BigDaddy will improve the quality of the Google index, without causing too much damage to "honnest" webmasters that respect the Google SEO informations for webmasters and other accessibility guidelines.

Do you have more informations about Google BigDaddy ? Don't hesitate to post them on this blog. Just create a nickname and go!

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