Bigdaddy progress update

In case you don’t want to download a 70 megabyte audio file, here’s the latest on Bigdaddy. Bigdaddy continues to roll out and is now available at three data centers. In addition to 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104, Bigdaddy is now up at 216.239.51.104. We’ve been going through the spam feedback and acting on it, and reading through the general search feedback as well.

Q: Is Bigdaddy still on track and launching?
A: Yes. Remember that Bigdaddy involves new infrastructure and is not just a data push or algorithm update. Don’t take it as a promise, but I’d expect a new data center to be converted to Bigdaddy roughly every 10 days or so. Again, take that as a rule of thumb. There are smart folks doing this transition, and they’re deciding how to do it in the best way.

Q: Will those IP addresses always show Bigdaddy results?
A: No, not always. Sometimes data centers are taken out of the rotation for testing or other reasons.

Q: Is there an easy way to test if a datacenter is running Bigdaddy?
A: There’s not a definitive way outside of Google. But the [sf giants] example that I mentioned in my pre-Bigdaddy 302 post remains a pretty good test. If the query [sf giants] returns giants.mlb.com, the odds are pretty good that you’re hitting Bigdaddy.

Q: How will I see the switchover happen?
A: It will happen naturally as more data centers switch over to the Bigdaddy infrastructure. The more data centers there are using Bigdaddy, the odds of you hitting a Bigdaddy data center in the normal rotation go up.

Q: Can I still give spam or quality feedback?
A: Absolutely. Follow the same instructions from my original Bigdaddy post. I’ll ask someone to review any new spam feedback, and I’ll request that someone look through the non-spam search quality feedback looking for issues as well.

143 Responses to Bigdaddy progress update (Leave a comment)

  1. Hey Matt…

    Big daddy appears to have removed thousands of my “spam-free” pages from the index. My page counts dropped like 700%.. It not just my site thats being affected, but dozens of other sites I’ve been monitoring.

    Is this because the update is not complete? or are you guys really intending to “spring clean” the index (even for what hates like me ) ?

    Thanks -David

  2. *i mean white hats like me?

  3. Good news. Now go bug whoever the AdSense complaints go to, because I submitted http://www.whios.sc/ yesterday and today they’re still displaying ads on pages that don’t have any content (right next to Yahoo contextual ads as well).

    Then you can call it a day (as far as I’m concerned). That whios site bugs me so much because i ma a crapyp typer sometomes.

  4. Matt –

    Can you give us a little more insight into what Google is trying to achieve with BigDaddy?

    Earlier guesses of mine include:

    A switch to 64 bit processors / new database structure
    BigDaddy is somehow connected with Googlebot (Mozilla version)
    BigDaddy is being used to gather information on SEO search terms (paroniod guess)

  5. Thanks for the update Matt Many people (myslef included) are finding that we are not getting as many pages indexed in BigDaddy for some of our sites. Is there any reason for this and can we expect the same level of indexing as we see on current data centers?

    Thanks

  6. On average, people will a little more indexing with BigDaddy.

  7. Thank you Matt, spam report was submitted. If you would like to contact me please do so. As I tried to relay without exposing to much info on your blog what I found was very cleaver and with my little experience I dont believe your bots would be able to detect this type of spam or manipulation.

  8. Hi Matt

    Indexed results seem to continually change,

    big daddy and hour ago had you top 3 now your blog is gone

    Odd

    Clint

  9. Hello Matt,

    I’ve noticed that some of the Big Daddy sightings show up to 30 Billion pages indexed. Is this the new document count in the Index? I’ve seen it go up from 25 Billion, which was it’s peak just a few days ago.

  10. Matt,

    I also want to say thank you for the update~ I, (as I’m sure do many others) appreciate the information that you pass along.

    Question: Can we expect a PR update with BD, or is it simply the index infrastructure?

  11. People like Ben make me laugh – where on whois.sc are there AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network ads?

    There are ads that are *similar* to Adsense, but those are in-house ads.

    Do your homework. If you are going to police the internet and rat out AdSense cheater at least do a little research and don’t waste the AdSense team’s time.

  12. This is off topic but thought it was interesting, have you read this yet Matt http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/01/01/8368125/index.htm

    I thought the future looks were quite enjoyable.

  13. Matt,

    Thank you for the post regarding the progress. I also wanted to thank you for doing that interview.

    I have some grave concerns about Big Daddy that I simply do not understand.

    For the keywords that I target, I see some really poor results. I can understand that my web sites may not be able to be in there historical rankings, but what I see there in its place for alot of key words is sub domain spamming, link spamming, big directories like DMOZ, Google Directory, and irrelevant websites.

    Dont get me wrong, there are maybe one or 2 at the most the deserve to be on page 1 that are there, but the rest are not. I have submitted countless spam reports, and dissatisfied results reports and have not seen a single change with regards to this.

    After what I heard yesterday on Webmaster Radio, I am really worried that there will be little changes to the results that I see. You did say in chat when i asked, that there will be some refinement to the results. But is it going to be significant? I do not get that impression, and I am hoping that I misunderstood you.

    If there will be little changes in index results, it makes me speculate if I should focus on content going forward, because with the above mentioned webistes that I see, it seems more probable that they are winning the google game.

    Sorry to come off like I am ranting, not intended at all, just my patience is beginning to show.

    Any thoughts as to why I have seen zero change this month in the index regardless of the data center?

    Thank You,

    Mike

  14. Matt,

    are the Bigdaddy results for US only or are the results that I am seeing for German search also what is to be expected in the future? In other words, will Bigdaddy be rolled out internationally?

  15. Matt – I really hate to ask this but could you look at the URL I have as my home page and please tell me what exactly I did wrong? I rarely ever complain about an update but it’s my blog/company home page and it’s not displaying the summary from the search results – I am getting the standard “No information is found for URL: thalasar.com yet Google is returning pages from the domain. The only thing I can think of is that my trackbacks from my various blogs list that URL (It’s an MT thing I think when hosting multiple blogs). I have done NO seo or for that matter link building, yet I seem no listing in Google. I am really up a tree with this update.

  16. I must agree with many people here that the index is again shpwing all this spammy sites and more towrads sites that actually pay and use ADwords…

  17. Hi Matt,
    Okay, I’ve submitted the spam report again as you indicated in the other topic. In additional to using the keyword “Bigdaddy” at the top I threw in the keyword “ZuluTime” just to make your searching for it easier 😉

    Hopefully we’ll begin to see some of these web spammers punished for playing on the wrong site of the fence.

    On another topic, I wish the radio guys would have asked you some more specific questions about exactly what Big Daddy is. I think we’re all curious as you’ve stated the following:
    “Bigdaddy involves new infrastructure.”

    That leaves us all wondering — infrastructure for what? Does this new update make it easier to track and remove spammers, easier to make subtle changes to the algorythm without it being a giant release (which seems likely), better, faster, more powerful, able to leap spammy sites in a single bound? What? Enquiring minds want to know 😉

    Thanks again,

    KJ

  18. This is the best Google update so far, go live already!

  19. Would everyone stop inferring that spammers are scum and low lives.
    Sure we set up site with the sole intention of making money online, but then don’t most web sites?

    We are seven ‘spammers’ sharing the same office (and revenue), and all of us have families, mortgages, ex-wives, car loans, etc… We all make a living ‘spamming’ the search engine results, but I can guarantee you all that none of us makes a lot of money. We drive average cars, live in average houses, and basically live average lives.

    Some months some of our sites make us good money, but then most of you don’t realize what the associated costs are with getting a large number of sites ranking quickly. It ain’t cheap!

    Do you guys have any idea what’s involved in setting up 1,000+ domains each month all with original content? Probably not.

    Another aspect you may not have considered is that we employ over 40 writers in several developing countries. All the writers get paid way over what they could ever get working locally, and my guess is that each writer is supporting several families.

    This year we are hoping to increase our output to over 5,000+ ‘spam’ domains each month. Assuming there’s a couple of hundred ‘spammers’ that have our output, that a lot of sites each year that Google doesn’t have a much chance of catching. I don’t care how many people you’ve got in you team Matt, hand checking the serps just ain’t going to do it.

    As to BigDaddy….the algo caught a couple hundred of our sites, and increased the rankings on a couple hundred more.

    Lastly, there are two groups of people who know where the holes are in the Google algo – Google and us ‘spammers’. And neither group are going to make public the info as there’s just too much money involved.

    None of us here want to go back and ‘work for the man’, so for the foreseeable future we’re just going to keep on doing.

  20. all your data belongs to me?

    sorry…had to say that big daddy 😉

  21. Good morning Matt

    Thanks for the BigDaddy weather report. Much appreciated.

    However, I couldn’t get exactly what you meant here:


    Remember that Bigdaddy involves new infrastructure and is not just a data push or algorithm update.

    Has an algo update already taken place on BigDaddy DCs?

    Thanks.

  22. Matt, by asking for feedback aren’t you, in effect, asking for highly bias complaints? Only about 0.00000001% will make it to page one for any given search term. The other 10000000 will always say the SERPs are no good!

  23. spectator – if you look closer you’ll notice it’s a typo url. Not “whois.sc” but “whIOs.sc”.

    If you go to http://www.whios.sc or any ‘page’ like http://www.whios.sc/somedomain.com you will see two blocks of ads – a Google ad next to a Yahoo ad.

    Note that it’s whIOs instead of whOIs.

  24. Hi Matt

    Any chance of some feedback on the feedback that you asked for sometime back?

    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/page/3/

  25. >>Any chance of some feedback on the feedback that you asked for sometime back?

    But Rob don’t provide any feedback on Matt’s feedback feedback, cuz it might create a feedback loop and get VERY noisy.

  26. Joe

    In feedback to your feedback to my feedback request to Matt’s feedback request.I hereby solemnly declare not to feedback on any feedback, from the feedback of the original feedback request.

  27. Search Engines Web, I’m guessing you’re a Beatles person more than an Elvis person. Do you make it around to other sites like Slashdot very often? 🙂

  28. Kevlar, PR updates are completely orthogonal.

  29. No slashdot user is able to use the word relevancy in a sentence. He’s also refrained from saying in Big Daddy, Google rates You, and also I for one welcome our Big Daddy Overlord 😉

  30. Hi Matt

    Google would have penalize you, Matt… for posting duplicates 🙂

  31. well Harith, maybe not if you were flying AdSense banners

  32. Hi Matt,
    I wrote about spam follow the same instructions from your original Bigdaddy post, but don’t see anythink results.

  33. I am also curious to know about the infrastructure upgrades. You guys should publish an updated “Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture” paper :).

    I don’t have any inside information, but I’ll take a guess: BigDaddy is more efficient at searching huge indexes, allowing the 25+ billion indexes we are seeing. Also, I’m guessing it will be better at personalized search results. Not only will this help Personalized Search users, but they might also be able to tune it to your location and/or do other ‘hidden’ personalizations. I have some other wild guess, but I don’t want to get in trouble.

  34. Hi Matt,

    what is the new task of the Mozilla Bot

    Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) ?

    Is it correct, that the new important Googlebot would be the Mozilla Bot? Is Bigdaddy the Mozilla-Bot index?

    Armi

  35. Based on some quick testing of Big Daddy, here’s what I found:
    1. It appears to be twice as fast (judging from the 0.14 vs 0.28 seconds readout in the upper right corner). I tried this multiple times and the results were always the same.
    2. It also left off a ton of old 301 redirects which were going to the same site. These were listed in Google with no descriptions and I always wondered why they were still there.

    Looks good so far.

    KJ

  36. Matt,

    I am seeing strange results when comparing those 3 datacenters.

    It seems that http://66.249.93.104 has a different cache to the other two.

    Well if I search for just my site name (yourpropertyfinder) on each DCs I see on http://66.249.93.104 a very fresh front page (I changed the homepage design at the weekend and it is now on this DC) with 66,000+ results (about right) the other two return a home page dated the 16th of Jan and only 330 pages.

    What data from each of the Datacenters is reliable?

    Cheers
    John

  37. Bigdaddy Supplementals ruin G’s NFP Public Service Search

    I host a popular NFP site and we used FDSE site search, until I discovered Google’s Pubilc Service Search (free without ads).

    As soon as I was authorised with the G code on our site I was alarmed to see it showed 12000 supplemental results in G (our site has never had more than 1000 pgs, and none show as supps previously.)

    Activating the PSS had caused G to ‘find’ and dump 11000 supplemental results into the main index.

    Worse still, the PSS returns the dead and non-existent supp results ABOVE the correct pages, rendering the PSS useless for our site.

    I had to remove it after three days, and revert to FDSE.

    Please get these dead Supps from G.

    Before I opened the PSS account site:ourdomain returned a true 600pg count, with no supps.

    After I opened the PSS, site:ourdomain returned 12000pg count, mostly dead and never existed Supps.

    We fixed cannonical problems months ago, and the cache on the Supps was over a year old.

    Please get these dead Supps from G. They are ruining PSS.

    I thought G’s PSS would be better than FDSE, but it is no where near as good.

  38. >Search Engines Web, I’m guessing you’re a Beatles person
    >more than an Elvis person. Do you make it around to other
    >sites like Slashdot very often? 🙂

    pwned! 😀

  39. The 66.249.92.99 IP also returns the new Bigdaddy results as far as i can see. The only thing that bothers me is that it seems to be that i get more localized results from a bigdaddy center than a regular center…

    I’m am from the netherlands and no matter what sort of queries i use, i always get lots of *.nl results on the SERPs..

    Is this one of the updates “improvements” you were talking about?

  40. Matt,

    Did you already answered to all the “outside e-mail” you received during your travel to San Diego? I’ve sent you an urgent e-mail, received the delivered receipt but had got no answer yet. 🙁

    Best regards.

  41. If you are not already aware, this might be something you want to take a look at? The internet is quickly becoming self policing yes? Have a good day.

    http://www.seobuzzbox.com/bmw-doorway-pages.html

  42. Matt,

    I must agree with Mike’s comment earlier. I too worry that the current results will stay as they are. I worry because they are truly some of worst results I have experienced. For some of the results I monitor here is what is what shows on top:

    – A plethora of scrapers
    – many subdomains for one single site take up a lot of the results. All of these results point to the same content anyway
    – 404s
    – Pages with fatal script errors
    – Pages containing all the words of the search phrase but seperated around the page to such an extent that the page is not relevant to the search phrase
    – Pages of a *ahem* large size. I’ve once ran a search where a result just above mine was 5085k !!!! My result was 18k
    – Raw affiliate links. Yes, raw!

    This is a great advertisement for Black Hat techniques. Why persist in maintaining sites that deliver relevent content for a user’s search if that site is being peed on from a height by the aforementioned results. Very disheartening.

    Sorry for the rant but I feel I must speak my mind about this. I’m sure you guys are very much aware of these poor results and will fix them soon.

    But just to have confirmation that these results are just temporary would make my night sleeps a lot more comfortable.

    Thanks for reading Matt.

  43. Good morning, Matt,

    All of the BigDaddy DCs still show red X’s for the missing images that are returned at the top of the results, as in:

    http://66.249.93.104/search?hl=en&q=captain+kirk&btnG=Google+Search

    Other than that, it looks good out here…

    P.S. If you see a sudden spike in searches for “Captain Kirk” you’ll know why… It was the only non-competitive term I could think of.

    Brian M

  44. Hi Matt,

    the BG daddy index is still incomplete. I know a huge amount of domains which are not completely indexed on the BigDaddy DCs (but these pages are available on the other DCs) and no – it is not spam!

    Maybe you can shed some light on this.

    Thanks!

  45. I am seeing an icrease of over 200k more pages of ours indexed in Big Daddy – I would love to see that turn into more traffic. I am struggling with getting interior sections of my site to come up in the search results – it seems Google only likes the main keyword and combinations on that. Any ideas anyone?

  46. Brian, I didn’t click the page.. but seeing a geocities page returned as the first result for anything, really scares me..

  47. Matt-

    Why does BigDaddy only display 2 results when I use the site:www.domain.com command BUT I see other pages indexed in the BigDaddy serps?

    Also, if I use site:domain.com I get those pages that I saw in the serps that did not come up in the site:www.domain.com.

    Heres the catch, the pages that show using the site command without www are pages that contain www. So why don’t they show using site:www.domain.com???

  48. Matt, by asking for feedback aren’t you, in effect, asking for highly bias complaints? Only about 0.00000001% will make it to page one for any given search term. The other 10000000 will always say the SERPs are no good!

    This really depends on the situation.

    I’ve found that a lot of people generally only complain if a search result above theirs happens to be spamming and they can catch it. It’s not just a “mine should be first” kind of thing (although I’m sure that happens a buttload and guys like Matt have to deal with it.)

    Here’s an example of such a search:

    http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&safe=off&rls=DVXA%2CDVXA%3A2005-04%2CDVXA%3Aen&q=Toronto+limousine

    Look at the #8 listing (www.torontocarservices.com) and do a “Select All”.

    Now if I’m someone on the second page, and I see that on the first page, I’m gonna be pissed off about that and rightfully so.

    (Note: this particular search had nothing to with me or a client I’m promoting. That’s why I used it.)

  49. By the way, Matt, you probably don’t care all that much (since Toronto isn’t exactly a large portion of your target market) but there’s a company called redtoronto.com spouting off radio ads about how they offer the best local search for the Greater Toronto Area.

    They claim that it’s better than the results of “the major search engines”. But they avoid naming any of them specifically.

    Personally, I think the site and search both suck, since it’s all sold to the highest bidder. But I just thought it might be of minor interest, that’s all.

  50. Hey Matt,

    i recently did a query on google.de looking for

    italienischer Telefonstecker

    ( italien Phoneplug )

    Ther serps shows on non Big Daddy gives me some pages about the plug i used to search. But on second seprs-site are only Sex, Porno pages. I did the same search on Big Daddy (mlb.sfgiants.com) and look the Sex and Prono pages where now on page 1 of serps? None of these pages even mention the searched Keys?

  51. Adam, I have come to the conclusion that legit business sites, that do a little keywords stuffing at the bottom, to make up for their flash pages, or all image welcome screens, don’t get banned from google.

    I’ve submitted several of them, several times, over the years (I always submit one whenever I find it), and I’ve never once seen one get removed from the results.

    The ones that are doing major spam though, always seem to get removed.

    Perhaps google has a tolerance with hidden keywords when the page is actually relevant?

  52. Hi again Matt, this is my second post. I am a wife/mom/budding webmaster for my husband’s law firm website, and I find your blog to be a very imformative place to learn about SEO!

    My first post was due to not understanding why I see so many different results as I search on Google.com. But now that I know that there are tins if different servers, some of which reflect the new Bigdaddy infrastructure, I am still a bit confused about results. Perhaps you or one of the other posters here can answer, I would certainly appreciate it. Although I have personalized this to my particular search, the same questions apply to any search, such as your example of “sf giants”

    My keyword search is “austin divorce lawyer”

    Results::

    Test Search # 1: 64.233.179.104 (I have seen referenced on other websites as “littledaddy”) http://64.233.179.104/search?hl=en&lr=&q=austin+divorce+lawyer&btnG=Search
    Results Test # 1:
    # 17/11.7 mil results, cache is from 26Jan 06 05:06gmt (this is my old website homepage)
    sf giants search: giants.mlb.com #1/5.850 mil results, (using your test mentioned above this should be the “new” info) http://64.233.179.104/search?hl=en&lr=&q=sf+giants&btnG=Search

    so far so good! I am happy with 17/11.7 mil results, although I am #9 in yahoo and #6 in msn for the same search

    Test Search #2: 216.239.51.104 (newest bigdaddy) http://216.239.51.104/search?hl=en&q=austin+divorce+lawyer&btnG=Google+Search
    Results Test Search #2:
    # 17/8.58 mil results, cache same as above (old website homepage)
    sf giants search: giants.mlb.com # 1/3.71 mil results http://216.239.51.104/search?hl=en&lr=&q=sf+giants&btnG=Search

    OK… at this point results are making sense except I do wonder why 11.7 mil results for search # 1 and 8.58 mil results for search # 2???

    Test Search #3: 66.249.93.104 (the first IP I saw referenced as Bigdaddy, perhaps the original?) http://66.249.93.104/search?hl=en&lr=&q=austin+divorce+lawyer&btnG=Search
    This is where it gets even more interesting… I started the search and was on page 1 of the results, then I had to leave to take my son to school. (thats the wife/mother part of my day job!) I came back, hit the next button expecting to see my site at # 17 as in the above searches, but no! Perhaps during my absence this went off of being on the Bigdaddy infrastructure, because here are my results:

    Results Test # 3:
    #244/4.220 mil results, cache is from 28 Jan 2006 18:14gmt (my new website homepage!)
    sf giants search: http://www.sfgiants.com # 1/1.86 mil results (using your test above this is the old info) http://66.249.93.104/search?hl=en&lr=&q=sf+giants&btnG=Search

    So…. for anyone who has read this far and cares to comment, what I want to know is this:

    1) Why are different numbers of results returned for the two searches (“austin divorce lawyer” and “sf giants” from ISP’s both running the Bigdaddy infrastructure?

    2) Is my assumption that # 3 must have gone “offline” (or whatever the tech term is for it) from the Bigdaddy infrastructure during my absence, and that is why page 1 of the search showed Bigdaddy type results, but going to page 2 upon my return, where I found fewer results, very different results, (ie #242 vs #17 for my website) appears to show “non Bigdaddy” results, inlcuding the old website for sf giants?

    3) Perhaps the most confusing to me: why does 66.249.93.104, which I believe was the “original” Bigdaddy, even when it is apparently “offline” from Bigdaddy infrastructure, still show the cache of my new webpage? So far, it is the only Google ISP address that seems to have the new cache from 28 Jan. When I have searched in the past, I have been #17 on this ISP with the new cache, so I think the Bigdaddy infrastructure was “online” at the time of those searches. Is this because it is not the data on the ISP that is changing, it is whether of not the Bigdaddy infrastructure is being used to search the data??

    I would appreciate any insights into these questions that you or any of the other posters here could share with me… or perhaps point me in the right direction to look for the answers myself.

    Thank you for the updates and for taking the time to do this blog, I find all this fascinating and this seems to be a really good place to learn.

    Kathy 🙂

  53. Hi Matt,

    One more quick question about results: (ok maybe two questions)

    Why does one of the ISP’s which appears to be using Bigdaddy infrastructure show a date next to the result for my website, but not the other? And what does the date mean?

    Why, even though both of the caches are the same one from 26 jan 06, which is my old website homepage, does the one with the date say 22k and the one without the date say 13k?

    Example:
    #1
    http://64.233.179.104/search?q=austin+divorce+lawyer&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N
    result: (shows date)
    http://www.denumlaw.com/ – 22k – 31 Jan 2006 – Cached – Similar pages

    #2
    http://216.239.51.104/search?q=austin+divorce+lawyer&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N
    result: (no date)
    http://www.denumlaw.com/ – 13k – Cached – Similar pages

    Finally (ok maybe three questions), just this second, while I’ve been typing this post, this server http://66.249.93.104/search?q=austin+divorce+lawyer&hl=en&lr=&start=0&sa=N is now once again displaying Bigdaddy data, because we are back to 17 from 244, I see my new cache from 28 jan 06, and I see sf giants has the giants.mlb page (however, there is no date next to my results on this server either). Just wondering what that means. Actually, it is shuddering between old and new, I hit refresh I have non Bigdaddy results, I hit refresh I have Bigdaddy results, etc… what’s up with that???

  54. Matt,

    Could it be safely assumed that the Big Daddy Server Update is only going live across in the US at the moment. Reason being that looking on the server for sites in the UK the page count seems to be incomplete for the majority of the sites in the sector I am looking at, compared to the existing google servers. Plus the servers are all google.com.

    If this is the case any idea when the update will reach other areas and will be complete?

    Cheers

    Chris.

  55. This update seems to really affect the “adult” serp’s.

    The wwwboard spammers are taking all the spots. The results are absolutley USELESS , and to make it worse almost all the “incest dog sex” spammers sites are pointing to the new wmf virus..

    Almost every serp displayed for adult search terms below #10 rank are hosted on educational sites , schools or childrens sites.

    Basically because of the way google ranks adult sites , they make links from .edu’s .gov’s rated really high by continuing this trend of scoring high rank to adult sites by giving priority to CHILDRENS sites they are bascially creating a market for hacking childrens and school websites to insert adult links..

    look at the top #100 results for an unrestricted adult search for “porn clips”

    Why would they intentionally make their adult search terms serps, display irellevant results ?? hmm i bet alot more people click on the ads !! and who cares , nobody is going to give them bad press over poor adult serps

  56. Hi Matt,

    On BigDaddy, one of the sites I manage is currently indexing about 80% fewer pages than what we typically have indexed on Google. It’s dropped from over 800 pages to roughly 150 pages. Should I be concerned or is that just in flux while testing is still going on? Thanks for your feedback.

  57. Hey Matt,

    Have I got something wacky in my crack pipe, or do the SERPs change on BigDaddy when you re-search for the same term? I’m seeing two different sets of results alternate just by re-clicking the search button!

    I saw this yesterday too, but thought maybe it was just a temporary thing. I’m looking at:

    http://66.249.93.104/

    Searched for “hawaii specials”.

  58. Something strange that I have never seen before in Google showed up last week. When doing a site:yourdomain.com one of my competitor sites was showing no descriptions, which I know isnt to unusual. What I did find that was strange was about the time I hit the 83rd page this site went from showing 10 indexed pages per page to only 2 indexed pages per page.

    If that wasnt explained well, here goes we know that Google shows 10 results per page, from page 83 to 100 there were only 2 results per page.

    It is corrected now but I thought this was quite strange.

  59. Michael,

    Being the wife of a criminal defense attorney, I can assure you that I am not on crack 🙂 but if you read my post above, the same thing is happening to me… It is as if one moment that server http://66.249.93.104/ is “online” with Bigdaddy, the next moment it is “offline” from Bigdaddy… (I don’t know if I am saying that right, but what I mean is somehow the results are “connected” or “not connected” to Bigdaddy infrastructure)

    And it can happen from one second to the next, Page 1 of a search appears to be Bigdaddy results, then in as quick as it takes to press the “next” button, page 2 is not Bigdaddy results. It can happen in a moment, be that way for ten seconds, then change back, or it can be that way for several hours or more.

    I don’t know much about search engines but it does appear to me that whether it is connected or not to Bigdaddy, the data on that particular server appears to stay the same, it is the number of results for your search that seems to vary.

    I say this because whether I get Bigdaddy or not Bigdaddy type results, the underlying data, such as which version of the cache of my webpage shows up, and whether or not there is a date next to the name of the website on the SERP, does not change whether my position and the number of results returned for my particular search term changes or not.

    You can try this if you have a little time… but you apparently do have to catch it at the right moment.

    go to: http://66.249.93.104/, do a search, then hit refresh several times, and you may see the change really soon, or you may have to keep that page open for a couple of hours and try again then, but you will, eventually, see very different results. Then when you get the different results, check the sf giants example, and see which one, sfgiants or giants.mlb comes up, and you will know if the server is with or without Bigdaddy… makes me wonder if Bigdaddy is sick, or has the hiccups, or what?? 🙂

    Kathy

  60. I randomly got a Big Daddy data centre a couple of days ago and was pleased that my site was completely indexed in it (previously some 60-70% of it was listed only as URLs) so excellent work! 😉

  61. IMHO, I hope the SERPS settle down just a bit. A search for one of our key terms shown 1,200,000,000 SERPS and the #10 listing is an internal page in a Japanese blog that has no PR or shows any incomming links…

  62. Why is it that Big Daddy favours big directories with lots of subdomains and no content and gives them top positions for instance when a 2 word term is searched for four places on first page are occupied by directories where each is given two places- main page plus some seemingly irrelevant subdomain page and they all no more than link lists. How does that benefit the person searching for information on that particular search term?!

  63. Wayne –

    Did you see this at the bottom of the results?

    In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already displayed.
    If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

  64. Ben no this was not omitted results. I had never seen it before and it was on one of the Bigdaddy DCs. It could have been some glitch but who knows.

  65. Matt,

    “PR updates are completely orthogonal”
    That’s an eight-sided polygon… with braces… right? (Sorry, I went to public school, so I must admit, I had to look it up.) 🙂

    Not to pester you with remedial questions, but is there a PR update on the horizon? I’m a little new to this, and have been spending a lot of time working on my sites, so I’m curious to see how fruitful my efforts will be…

    Thanks again…

  66. Kevlar, the PR updates are worthless fluff anyway. Stop obsessing over nonsense that won’t help you with your rankings.

    Orthogonal comment: My security code said “NBAY”. We know about “ebay”. Where’s the rest of the alphabetBAY?

  67. >PR updates are worthless fluff anyway
    >nonsense that won’t help you with your rankings.

    Its all in the eyes of the beholder.

    Lot easier getting links with a higher PR than a lower PR.

  68. Part of Google strategy to protect its Adsense Product to reduce irrelevant search terms

  69. Hi Matt,

    May I know when will we can see the update of our PR on the google toolbar?

    Thanks

  70. Matt,
    I offered free subdomain hosting in the past and I have since discontinued it because of abuse. I still see a lot of the old free sub domain hosting pages showing up even on this new updated server. When can I expect to see this crap fall out of the rankings? There are just tons of garbage bot generated pages that I do not want associated with my website. They are all 404 as I no longer allow subdomains on my site, but they are still showing up in the rankings. Because of this my actual website that is a nice little resource to so many people has been penalized by the big G 🙁

    Once the crap is no longer recognized will I ever get my rankings back? It was only a few hits per day but it was nice to know I was helping people.

  71. What a maroon said:
    >Lot easier getting links with a higher PR than a lower PR.

    So?

  72. >Search Engines Web, I’m guessing you’re a Beatles person

    OH SNAP

  73. Hi

    i have been seeing some strange results for my ite in some of the datacenter, where inner page has Much more high PR then home page. as well as when i do typical URL search i dont see my site but yes with some keywors i can get my sits result…
    Quite strange….

  74. Well I have to say that all of my 302 redirects are looking MUCH better. They are all following the correct format and have titles and descriptions (which were missing in other DCs). Even one site that had a 301 is looking great.

    I’ve been quite impressed (even if I will have to work harder to keep / move up on certain keywords because of increased results). Keep up the good work.

  75. I’ve trolled and posted in webmasterworld and the .mac forums, but have had no success. Matt Cutts’ comment page readers you are my only hope…

    I built a site and hosted it on .mac, then moved it to a seperate server with more control than the regimented .mac. My question is, how do I forward from the old .mac directory to the new site?

    on .mac: homepage.mac.com/me/blog/website/
    on new server: website/

    I can’t seem to get htaccess to work on .mac, although somehow got one loaded there.

    Is metarefresh ok? I don’t think it is. but I’m at a loss to do the right thing.

  76. >>>>Kevlar, the PR updates are worthless fluff anyway.

    To some degree – but not if you are talking about PR0 compared to PR4/5/6

    All I know is that doing a Google XML query shows very different ranks on non-bd DCs and bd DCs – as in PR0 versus PR5s

    But I guess that is more hopefull sign of a removal of a penalty rather than the value of the PR.

  77. Hello everybody!

    First of all excuse my english.

    I think I’ve found another way to test if the datacenter is running Bigdaddy. When you are googling on a datacenter with BigDaddy you can’t set your preferences on the search. When you try to set your preferences for the search (at least when you type one of the 3 BD IP’s and the Google page is set automatically in Spanish (my language)), the page sais that the cookies are disabled.

    Does this happen in all the languages?

  78. If you have a quality site, people will want to link to you regardless of your PR. Good content keeps people coming around.

    I’m sick of these people who go about buying links to their site to artificially inflate their PR, and all these “adsense sites” with nothing but shit on them.

  79. orthogonal = irrelevant

  80. AHFX –

    You probably should avoid 302s altogether and use 301s. My understanding is that Bigdaddy will handle all redirections better but 302 (temp redirection) has confused SEs in the past.

  81. If you have a quality site, people will want to link to you regardless of your PR. Good content keeps people coming around.

    Julie, not entirely. Try being a marketing company, web design company, advertising company, rental car company, auto loan company etc…

    Not many of your clients will link to you without pressure, your competitors surely won’t link to you, and you usually don’t have anything too buzzworthy to generate the viral link bait, especially if you’re trying to run a professional looking site.

    What’s left to do to get links? Sure you’ll get a few, but not a ton.

  82. Perhaps the 302 confusion was just temporary….

  83. I AM SOOOOO sorry!!

    Dear Matt,

    In an effort to speed-up submitting info to BigDaddy, I did a one paragraph thing that I could easily cut/paste the offending URL in: “Site yaddayadda.com is doing thus and so, so please remove yaddayadda.com from your index. Thanks!” type of thing.

    Unfortunately one of those offending URLs started with the word brain (i.e. brain.yaddayadda.com). More unfortunately I forgot to cut the word brain in all subsequent BigDaddy submissions which then read: “so please remove brain yaddayadda.com

    So to all of those who I completely, and unintentionally, I told to remove their brain — MEGA mea culpas. . . . .

    Sarah

  84. On the BigDaddy DC’s, I am seeing a site which I 301’d about a month and a half ago showing at its old domain name instead of its current domain name.

    This appears to mean one of two things:

    1. BigDaddy is using old data.
    2. BigDaddy has new bugs in 301 handling.

    Neither of these are good options.

  85. I wonder if all of Matts blog readers are actually undeclared Google Beta Testers.
    🙂

  86. Dear Matt,

    I used “cache:www.mydomain.com” in both 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104 and found that they show different version of content these days. Does that mean the content of these 3 data centers are not synchronized?

    Thanks.

  87. So far it looks like I am going to like Big Daddy. Thanks for the update and for your humor.

  88. orthogonal doesn’t equal irrelevant.

    orthogonal = statistically independant

    In other words, PR update is independant of the switch to Big Daddy.

  89. Hi Matt
    I guess this is probably the wrong place to be asking the question, but here goes:

    How does Google treat and rank accessibility in websites?

    Do you penalise / reward websites for their accessibility?

    I would love to see a post on it

    cheers

  90. Hi, I was wondering if it would be possible to validate this being appropriate to deal with the redirect of a non-www domain to the www preceded version via a 301 type redirect in Apache :

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.net [NC]
    RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ http://www.domain.net/$1 [L,R=301]

    I have read that, depending on the type of HTTP (1.0, 1.1…), that there are different and better ways of handling this ?

    Thank you

  91. This is Bigdaddy Progress Update. I love to see what happen next with now new datacenters.

  92. Hi Matt,

    I notice that the results from the DCs you name as BigDaddy DCs have no fresh tags whereas the .com and .co.uk results have regularly updated fresh tags, looks like every 48 hours. It looks like the Big Daddy results are from a snap shot on a fixed date which starts to be updated with fresh crawl information as it migrates onto the “normal” DCs.

    Is this correct?

    Thanks for the information.

    Best wishes

    SSSSid

  93. Matt.

    Just a quick reiteration of what somebody posted earlier…

    The “home” graphic in the top left corner of all the Big Daddy DCs is broken. It doesn’t work.

  94. Hi Matt,

    How come sites using linking schemes rank so well on big daddy? they get better results than now.

  95. Hi Matt,
    Thanks for the info. However, there seems to be an increase in webpages, Something to do with the algo.

    In short, when i was on Page 1 around #5-6 on a good keyword of mine, with bigdaddy i have been booted to page 60. (600+ rank)

  96. Matt,
    Great show the other night on rockstars, insightful as always. I’ve been trying to apply what I’ve learned on this blog and on big daddy it really seems to be paying off for me. Just in time for baby number 2, she should be here some time next week. Thanks again for what you share here it has really made a difference for me. I still have a ways to go, but I feel I’m on the right path to having a sucessful web site.
    John

  97. Hi Matt,

    How Big Daddy handles duplicate content ? I have a site where i write unique content, i provide rss feeds for other sites to displays firs paragraph of test from my articles and guess what ? Sites fed with rss are way above my site with full article and my site gets filtered out.

    Second thing. My wordpress installation creates long page names /like -my-very-long-article-title-and-something-more/, it looks spammy. Will Google give me penalty for this ?

  98. Hey, Cool, You use the same random image background as I do for my site. I don’t even remember where I got it from. Mine is case insensitive though 😉

  99. Hey Matt,

    I’ve recently reported nearly 20 spam sites for the keyphrase “wow gold”. There has been a numerous # of sites spamming that keyphrase on blogs and with false/wasted content. The funniest thing is, all those sites have “translate into english” next to them. Worst part is all the content in there are either no where related to “wow gold” and the content are stolen.

  100. Hi Matt,

    I have gone through your interview bout bigdaddy, it has all the major points, but I still want some suggestions from u.

    u said that age of the site ll be an imp factor, so wht bout the sites which r new, wht steps shld be taen to promote it, and u didnt talked bout keywords presence, density or anything.

    One thing more will it be a PR update also. Pls give suggestions.

    Thanks

  101. Dude, it’s ok to use vowels.. really. it won’t hurt anything.

  102. Hi Matt,

    As everyone I am happy with BD updates. BD DCs showing more relevant results.

    Is PR update delayed (111 day mark is soon to be history.) because BD updates keep google people occupied?

    Thanks a lot

  103. On regular or non-BigDaddy search results I have over 38,000 pages for site:www.website.com.
    When the BigDaddy results are displayed, sometimes they do appear depending on the datacenter I guess but when they do it shows my site as having only 700 pages indexed.
    When I check for various pages, even whole sections of pages for my site on BigDaddy they just aren’t indexed. My main page is there and my search results are just fine for the pages that are there.
    It has been this way since BigDaddy first appeared on the scene way back before the holidays.

    Can I expect my site cache of current Google search to move over to BigDaddy, or will BigDaddy update and eventually index the rest of my site?
    Eventhough my search ranks are Ok it seems the best parts of my site seem to have vanished on BigDaddy. Well from 38000 to 700, that quite a lot of missing cache.

    I noticed others saying the same thing and any info on this would be great.

    Thanks, Joe

  104. Hey Matt,

    So far Big Daddy looks like a disaster for both Google and White Hats. Here’s hoping you guys can pull it together before it goes live. On another note my Yahoo search traffic is up 5x since the 12/27/05 reindexing. At least in my market segment, Google’s crappy results are being noticed.

    — T

  105. I have noticed that our websites have been dropped from google.co.uk’s “Pages from the UK”, even though we are based in the UK, and one of the sites (“Explore St Pauls Cathedral”) is actually a virtual tour ABOUT St Pauls Cathedral IN THE UK.

    We used to have page one listings for our UK-BASED websites !

    What’s up?

  106. 2/6

    Well Matt,

    Now that Google has gone through the wonderful Big Daddy update, I find that over 100 of my valid pages in the google index have disappeared and most of the eleven that are left are pages that I are now longer on my website.

    I bet I am not the only one that has this problem. Maybe if Google would actually pay attention to the Google sitemap updates, this would not happen. Guess I can only hope that Google gets itself straightened out someday.

  107. WOW MATT,

    I am a little disheartened, after submitting that BigDaddy spam report I have not seen any action taken, this report was also filed 3 or 4 weeks ago by regular spam report. For something to be this blatant and explained in simple map like detail and still no action leaves me wondering if Google even cares about spam that is meant to manipulate YOUR serps. The example you gave of BMW is nothing compared to what I reported.

    The thought that keeps driving me nuts is that if I did something like this I would be dropped in a heart beat if reported, but it seems Google allows certain people to get by with spamming their engine. This also causes me greater concern as to why anyone should create a website for longterm growth since spam tactics seem to in my eyes prevail over webmasters whom try to abide by Googles guidelines.

    Please excuse the rant as I try to understand the thought process behind allowing this type of manipulation, yet we always hear Google preach DO NO EVIL.

  108. Here http://www.cached.it/english/Bigdaddy-dance.php you can query on new 3 datacenter with bigdaddy

  109. I’m a lttle concerned with the bigdaddy results as well… I just hope that the white hat sites prevail…… Sites that have been online for years, which are clean, unique and follow all of the webmaster guidelines should be given priority.

  110. Gee Wayne, for someone who keeps claiming you dont know much, you sure seem to be the spam expert. Still smarting from getting your ass kicked off of every other forum on the entire Internet and now you take on Matt?

  111. i agree that some results are quite poor. i have a well ranked 1-page fun project surrounded by only doorway pages since the last update, some repeat the most important keyword in every second word or just use javascript to instantly open the “right” site in a new window when you click at this result.
    also some old and well ranked sites with good content are gone or dropped 20 positions or more for other keywords.

  112. -Kirby Said,
    February 7, 2006 @ 7:22 am

    Really Kirby, if thats so it is news to me, I guess I should ask around on the forums I post on and moderate if I have been kicked off. I understand your fear though Kirby 🙂

    -John Colascione Said,
    February 7, 2006 @ 2:04 am

    I couldnt agree more, but age doesnt mean anything, even sites that have been around for a while use some tactics that are against Googles guidelines, such as purchasing links/ footer links on forums, keyword stuffing, hidden text, hidden links, doorways, CSS Stuffing and multiple sites not related to the linked site with hidden links pointing to one particular main site.

    Bigdaddy seems to be headed in the right direction but it still has some changes that I am sure Google intends to work on

  113. >moderate

    Wow! Im impressed! Not bad for someone who keeps claiming that they dont know much about this stuff (post dated Feb 1st, “with my little experience”).

  114. -Kirby Said,
    February 7, 2006 @ 4:31 pm

    Kirby you act like some of this is rocket science. I understand some of the finer points of Seo, but I am no expert. My experience has come from losing a lot of money to so called Seo experts who dont come out and tell you what they are doing is against SE guidelines.

    Until I started to take a more hands on approach I didnt know much. To this day I couldnt design a CSS file or robot.txt file so that should speak to my limited knowledge. I do know how to detect spam, I know what tools to use to find it and some of the neat little tricks some of the so called Seo guru’s are using from reading the forums.

    If me pointing out sites to Matt that violate Google’s guidelines offends you, well I would have to ask myself why. As I said in another post, if Google chooses not to take action against all spam, then what is the point of building a website for a long term future.

    Forgive me Kirby but I find your attacks on me to have some other alternative motive. Maybe you dont like the fact that I WILL point out spam given the opportunity or you are a competitor or one of the so called Seo experts I canned. I operate a business and part of my business model is internet sales, when there are factors that hinder that portion of my business that violate guidelines that have been setforth by search engines like Google, I have two options, I can either join the club and spam with them or I can report them and hope that Google means when it says, “Do No Evil”

  115. I am not offended by your reporting spam. Just think its funny when someone goes to great lenghts to try and take down SitesPositionedAboveMe.

  116. I have a site selling Seiko watches in the UK. It has for a long time been at approximately positions 2-5.
    I have just read the article about the Google BigDaddy project. I have checked my position using the three BigDaddy IP addresses and do not appear to be it the top 1000.
    I have checked the site and do not appear to be breaking any rules (as far as I know)
    Anybody any ideas or feed back that might help? Please.

  117. Is the Big Daddy Update delaying the Google Tool Bar Update? Seems to be taking longer than normal.

  118. I get minimal traffic from Google in any event. They rank in my stats just behind MSN. Yahoo still give me the best traffic and their index appears much cleaner in any event than Google.

  119. Very likely this is not the right place, but …

    Wouldn’t it to be a good idea to update the spam-report page on google. I used it a few times, and most of the time was not sure, what to fill in. Sometimes something is so obviously spam, why should I bother fill in a google query? Or don’t I have to? For normal folks, IMHO it is not clear, what is needed…
    Or does google only rely on one SEO report another? 🙂

    Subdomain spam examples like:
    http://larry-page.predicant.be/
    http://matt-cutts.preto bedicant.be/

    should not need any explanations, or do I get the Google understanding of spam completely wrong?

    Aha, BigDaddy because I hope that google at the end finds a better way dealing with obvious spam (especially the non-English ones, the above example most likely is of a Polish spammer)

  120. Matt, whatis the bigdadday? Why? What the butt? Spamers? Businesses?

  121. Hi Matt,
    is that big daddy dc now permeated through the index to the UK dc. Am getting query results with the same results but the IBL and page counts appear to be in line with what Big Daddy results were.

    TY
    M

  122. Hi Matt.

    Firstly, thanks for the information.

    Secondly, we are see two different Googlebot user agents in our stats, the first is the traditional one “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)” is this second one Big Daddy or something else? “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”

    If it is some else, would you mind giving a quick explaination.

    Thanks in advance.

    Andrew.

  123. Hi Matt,
    I’m a SEO specialist from Italy and I wanted to know, if it’s possible, when Dig Daddy will be finally on line. I have to say that tryng the DCs where Big Daddy is running I have find many “plus” with my works.

    Best Regards

    Enrico

  124. So is Google doing away with the adult industry?.
    The serps for adult searches are the worse I have ever seen.
    Redirects to dialers rule a lot of adult search terms is this ever going to be cleaned up?.

  125. Finally, seems that Bigdaddy kicked-in full force yesterday. I am reading a lot these days about “maintaining relevancy”, “eliminating spam”, etc. At the same time, my site (which only had 300 or so pages in Google, has been built slowly in the last two years and has a normal link profile made of directory listing articles and spontaneous links) is now showing only 125 pages. Around 180 pages have been wiped out from Google, including my index page.

    I would really like to know how punishing my site (which is the antithesis of a spam site) helps maintain “relevancy”. Now, apparently, it is more important to have a short URL than a relevant, useful site…

    While I am still at a loss on why my site was punished, I am speculating that perhaps my “sin” is that my site is hosted as a subdirectory of a different domain, with the actual domain pointing to the destination page through a 301 redirect.

    While I try to figure out the answer, I will continue to see thousands of spammy sites with hundreds of thousands of automatically generated garbage pages still showing up in Google.

    Long live “relevancy”…

    Mario.

  126. Big Daddy has eaten my site! I’ve taken great care to build my site to all the rules set down by Google. The pages are written with unique content, we send a lot of time developing good links on very relvant websites. And as a Goolge ranked us very highly for our keywords. Suddenly Big Daddy hits and my site is wiped of the face of the earth!

    After checking the results for one of my keywords I find that the site ranked 1 has no relevant text content at all not one word, can can this possibly be the best result? I don’t mind moving down the results, but to be replaced by bad results leaves me lost.

    Can you help matt? or anyone else?

  127. Our sites seem to be indexing well in Big Daddy which are in the gambling sector.

  128. Hey Matt

    Which of the page rank / future page rank tools give the best indication?

    Paul

  129. Matt:

    I have followed the much ballyhooed Bid Daddy datacenters closely. And from what I have seen they are rendering false or misleading results. Please note that I am making my comments from a constructive standpoint, not from one who has been negatively impacted (although that is most definitely the truth).

    I want to preface my comments by stating that I have been in the internet business for 8 years. I have personally done my SEO for all of those 8 years and have never spammed Google. For all of those 8 years, Google has really liked the quality and relevance of (http://hotelmotelnow.com/). Many of my webpages have a PR5.

    I don’t make a statement unless I can back it up, so here is my proof:

    A site:hotelmotelnow.com search in 64.233.179.104 (the default site I get), 66.249.93.104 and 216.239.51.104 renders 43,500, 92,500, and 43,500 total sites for hotelmotelnow.com. Everyone of the cached results of the 1,000 I can view, except for the homepage, has a copy of the hotels page from last July and August 2005.

    This is especially interesting because a complete overhaul of the hotels page was done in December 2005. However, three months later Big Daddy still hasn’t picked this up? Click on the hotels page and see the much improved product.

    The same search in 72.14.207.104 renders 253,000 webpages with the cache of the new hotels page. However, I have not seen 72. come up as the default in ages.

    I closely watch my logs and Google now rarely pays a visit. When they do, they don’t stay very long and only scratch around. All of 2005 and prior years, Google would crawl 1,000 pages in 30 minutes or so and refresh within 2 days. Now refreshes are rare in 72. and non-existent in the Big Daddy’s.

    For all of 2005, hotelmotelnow.com ranked on the first page for most of my targeted searches (e.g. cityname 5 star hotels, cityname 4 star hotels, cityname extended stay hotels, cheap cityname hotels, etc. for the major cities like New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Las Vegas, etc.). Most of these rankings were #1. I am sure you have historical files so I welcome you to check them out.

    Since December 13, the rank has fallen to #30-50 in 72.14.207.104 and not even listed in any of the Big Daddy’s. My question is: How can a site that was considered so relevant in 2005 not even be included in Big Daddy?

    There can only be a few reasons. #1 reason could be that there is a duplicate content penalty assessed by Google. When I hired the programming firm to update the hotels page last fall they failed to include a no index, no follow tag on the http://dev.hotelmotelnow.com/ site that they used to test the programming. I didn’t catch it until Google had already indexed part of it. I informed Google on numerous occasions and even filed a reinclusion request but was informed that there is no penalty or banning on hotelmotelnow.com.

    Reason #2 is that hotelmotelnow has incurred some kind of spam penalty. Since I have not spammed Google, I don’t see how this can be. I have worked non stop since December 13( when the rankings disappeared from the #1 position) and added a lot of new content. However, Big Daddy has not added any of the new content.

    Reason #3 is that there is some flaw in Big Daddy that has not been discovered yet. I reiterate, why would Bid Daddy completely disregard a website that was considered so relevant for 11 1/2 months of 2005 and the previous 6 years?

    In closing, since Google is now alerting siteowners of problems with their site, I would sincerely appreciate it if the Google Search Quality Team would do a review and send me a notice of any problems they see with hotelmotelnow. Like I said earlier, I have worked non-stop for 3 months now and cannot see why Google would not want a great content site like http://hotelmotelNOW.com/ again high in their index.

    Thanks for your time and consideration.

    Jim Clouse
    Owner
    http://hotelmotelnow.com/

  130. Hi Matt – thanks for keeping us informed on the BigDaddy state of play. Could you spare 5 minutes at some point and post an update of progress on your blog? There seems to be a lot of questions here and on many forums, and not many answers!

  131. I ws wondering how you run test on your indexing and positioning system? Maybe It would be a good Idea to run a seo contest using a word or 2 words that do not exist on any search engine. Track and follow the fresh new word or words, this I would believe give google an easy and clear way to see google true indexing and positioning system at work. Letting Google refine and perfict it’s way of indexing and positioning web sites.

  132. Hi Matt
    All pages containing CSS property display:none dropped in nowhere. I used it for some submenues and expanding/collapsing objects. Is that
    a side effect of bigdaddy, or display:none property turns a CSS paria of algo ranking ?
    does anybody experienced this ?

  133. my seo consultant pointed me to this page, after I asked her if she did anything recently to account for a traffic jump on my Canada directory.

    Seems about every 6 months (seo newbie here) my directory …which is my lifeblood – takes a google dive or jump. It averages out over the course of a year, and before bigdaddy, it had been fairly steady, then took a nosedive in traffic. I’m working with my seo to figure out what I need to do to improve my chances of avoiding the rollercoaster. My guess is that I’ve gotten caught in the same net being used to weed out sites that throw bunches of links on multiple pages to snare traffic.

    I read the post about the business that employs xx number of people setting up 1000’s of domains each month. I’ve heard the same argument from telemarketers. Telemarketing firms employ people too, but there’s a reason why ppl don’t gripe aanywhere near as much about the plethora of stores selling homemade pies, as they do about TM’s. The words “in your face” come to mind, and I’m not refering to the pies.

    If I can provide a quality directory, and make a good living doing it, AND do it in ways that follow good netiquette, then I’ll go to the old folks home some day with something besides my bag of Depends.

    For now, I’m one who is hapay BigDaddy has rolled into town, and brought back lost traffic with it.

  134. Hi Matt,

    I just have one quick question: when can we expect that the roll-over to Big Daddy will be completed? You mentioned 1-2 months in January … has this roll-over been successful? Thanks!

  135. I noticed changes in my rankings. My site is completely spam free – been on google and all the other sites for years. Always ranked in the top 2 pages. Now it’s tumbled down to page 14!!! I can’t figure it out since we haven’t really changed anything – but suddenly we’re dropped. Is this what we can expect from Big Daddy? Or is there a process taking place and right now we’re just being knocked around until the dust settles?
    It seems there is more taking place than just a data center switch.

  136. Hi Matt,

    In an earlier post you said that the Big Daddy project should be much less noticeable than an update but at the moment the effects seem to be devastating to many white hatters, slashing the amount of pages indexed. Can you give us any insight…hope.. that this is just temporary?

    Cheers

    Nial

  137. Hi Matt,

    I’m a student working in my last year of college and I’m working as a SEO for the company iJobs for my graduation. The ‘funny’ thing is that last week when you searched for ‘java vacature’ in the dutch google version, iJobs could be found on page 3. This monday the url for iJobs couldn’t be found in the whole index. I blame Big Daddy. I also blame iJobs though. The problem is that iJobs is part of iSense&… and iSense has another site, http://www.staffing.nl. On that site they have some of the same jobs, excact copies of the jobs on iJobs. So I think the duplicate content filter has removed the iJobs url from the index. I was wondering if there could be a way to bring iJobs back into the index. Cause my first though was that they are forced to split the jobs. So unique content for both sites. Or is there another option?

    Please help!

    Thanks,

    Atin

  138. Dance BigDaddy, Dance finally! We are all eagerly waiting for your update in our PR.

  139. Getting even one or two links from high page rank sites improves things no end, some of our customers have links from organisations such as tv stations & the police, these are a real bonus!

  140. Getting even one or two links from high page rank sites improves things no end, some of our customers have links from organisations such as tv stations & the police, these are a real bonus!

  141. Hi Matt,

    A Simple question, what do one should do to keep its complete data display ( whole pages indexed). in case if the site have unique data and everything is very good.

    And one more thing – an idea i am giving you.. Why dont google give a priority to those sites who has more returning visitor then more unique visitor. Because if a site gains more returning visitor in comparison to the number of unique visitor within a geographic location it means the site is more popular and content of the site is more verified…as i think this is just a very good strategy to show a better indexing or improve the SERPs.

    Well i dont know much then you, i just love google, but i feel the results are still unjustice.

    Lots of love.
    D

  142. Hi Matt,

    I have gone through your interview about bigdaddy, it helped me a lot but I also want to ask you some minor things

    If the age is a better factor then what steps should be taken to promote new sites, I heard that new sites have gone to Sandbox due to improper promotions

    One thing more will it be a PR update also. Pls give suggestions.

    Thanks

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