What has been the most talked about, Hugely known, company? Almost every one by now has heard something or other about this company. They have plans for many innovations for the internet. They currently making deals with video, have a chat program and let you take an in depth look at the planet Earth. With designs for a cheap net capable PC this company has dug its roots firmly into place. The funny thing is, no one knows the company for all these feats. What they are known for are organic search engine results. The company that is being talked about yet again is (*sigh*) Google.

True that Google wants to rule the internet, who wouldn’t want to with the power and support they seem to have. To keep them in this point of power they must stay the best search engine query system and stay on top of MSN and Yahoo. To lose to one of these Search Engine companies would show weakness and could hurt their efforts in all the other plans they already have in effect.

To try to stay on top of the game Google must continually rewrite the algorithms that are used to check different things against websites to see where they should be placed in the rankings. As Yahoo, and Msn fight Google for better relevancy in their listings, Google has to make changes of its own to stay on top of the game. The last major update by Google was the infamous “Jagger” update. This update upset thousands of people around the world. I got a good handle on it and all clients were doing good “post Jagger”.

That’s when you think the storm is over and really you are just standing in the calm, in other words the eye of the storm. One side hit you now you are in the calm but the other side of the storm is going to hit you eventually.

The other side of this storm is “BigDaddy”. “BigDaddy” is Google’s newest update to better their services. This update is claimed not to be a fix to the algorithms but a new data center infrastructure, a feat much bigger and comprehensive than an algorithm change. It has already started and as I write this they are continuing to spread to more and more data centers. If you go to Google.com and search the term “sf giants” if you get the listing giants.mlb.com in the #1 spot then chance’s are you are seeing a BigDaddy server. This was suppose to roll out in a mater of months as Matt Cutts from Google said they would roll out a new big daddy data center approximately Every ten days or so. Right now it looks as though it is faster then expected as many data centers will show as BigDaddy using the above test, but later it can be gone.

Even though they claim this has nothing to do with changing the algorithms, many people have already started the boohoo, whiney, my sites not found or they are now only indexing a small percentage of my site. There is rumored talk that a huge netquake may follow with rankings going crazy. We all hope that one passes by as quietly as possible. There is also talk that right now you can do a search and within minutes do the same search and get different results for every time you refresh the SERPS. What does this mean exactly?

Rob Sullivan, head organic search strategist at search marketing firm Enquiro, “If an algorithm update is like putting new tires on a car or installing a new stereo system, this BigDaddy is like putting in a whole new motor. They’re totally revamping how Google works and resolving some long-standing issues with getting sites indexed properly.”

“This will lay the groundwork for more advanced algorithms, larger databases, and being able to index different types of content more effectively,” he says. For example, Google has also begun using a search crawler built on a Mozilla browser. The new search bot is more flexible, seems faster and can read non-text content more readily; that should mean that in time, it will be able to read links within images and even within Flash video, matter that gets ignored by bots that can’t speak Javascript. “As Web technology develops and we get richer and more interactive Web sites, [the search engines] can’t just stick with just indexing hyperlinks and text,” Sullivan says. “They’re going to have to do everything.” (quotes from an article done by Brian Quinton)

No matter the outcome on this newest act of salvation by Google, I feel we may all feel the rumbling under the net and some of us will slip through the holes, but those of us that study and use only the cleanest white hat methods and search engine optimization practices will, after the smoldering debris clear the playing zone, those of us left on top of the mountain will be showing others how it was done. Our team is no longer afraid of Google updates as we know we will grow and evolve with them and as long as we stay with good practices we haven’t seen anything but good results from Google with the exception of a few sites slipping under but that is to be expected and I fully believe that is nothing to worry about either. They will come back if you did your search engine optimization correctly and not like that of some fancy car manufactures. Brave the storm that is brewing wisely now before it totally hits because this is the perfect time to make the changes you need done to make your site safe and with the changes and new content you could be surprised what will happen to these sites. Until I learn more about this BigDaddy beast we shall just have to ride it out and pray we all don’t get thrown off. –JMT

This article was posted on February 21, 2006

About The Author

Jim Trivolette works as office manager and search engine optimization specialist for www.blackwoodproductions.com. “The last year showed us some awesome changes on the net I can’t wait to see what happens this year!” -jmt

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