Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
This quote is from Matt Cutts blog:
I’m about blogged out for the day, and there are better places to discuss this stuff (WebmasterWorld, Search Engine Watch Forums, etc.). The best way to get people to process your feedback is to use the spam report form or the dissatisfied link, make sure that you include the keyword “bigdaddy” and try to be as specific and clear as you can.... I’d be delighted to get webspam feedback, but I’m most interested in hearing feedback about canonicalization, redirects, duplicate urls, www vs. non-www, and similar issues. Before you send in a report, please read my previous posts on url canonicalization, the inurl operator, and 302 redirects.
[mattcutts.com...]
[edited by: tedster at 11:45 pm (utc) on Jan. 4, 2006]
[edit reason] shorter quote - add link [/edit]
>>Elaborate on what? <<
C'mon steveb.. you can do better and you know it.
You posted:
Big Daddy at this point is primarily a ranking update, regardless of what caused it.
Didn't ya :-)
Now tell us at least what have inspired you on such wonderful Saturday morning to declare BigDaddy as primarily a ranking update?
Thanks a bunch.
I think that Reseller was just asking for clarification of your "Big Daddy at this point is primarily a ranking update, regardless of what caused it." comment.
It's usually customary to put IMHO or something similar, so must we assume that you have solid proof of your post. It would be very helpful if you could point us, less informed, to the source of this information.
It's just that I was under the impression that Big Daddy was "some new infrastructure, not just better algorithms or different data. Most of the changes are under the hood, enough so that an average user might not even notice any difference in this iteration".
All the Best
Col :-)
Matt has made some intresting comments about supplimental results over the last few days. Including:-
- Supplimental results lay over the top of the main index.
- Supplimental results are crawled by a Supplimental Googlebot
- Supplimental Googlebot is an infrequent visitor and is not due for a while
- Normal Googlebot can not change the url of supplimental results.
Of these the last one is the one I am most worried about - the Canonical and Hijack issue has caused lots of sites not to get crawled correctly and therefore go supplimental - so if this is correct and normal Googlebot comes along to visit it is not able to do certain things with supplimental pages - eg once supplimental always supplimental? - it was always my belief that once you got crawled by normal Googlebot again supplimental will reduce - but it appears that G may keep a "ghost" version of these pages at the very least.
With your comments about this being more like a ranking update - personally I am not seeing this and I think that Google have correctly identified more homepages which were previously missing - as I have previously said these dont rank though.
However, your comment rings true - MC says no ranking update while at the same time lots of posters here say they like/dislike the new results on the test DC.
I personally cant find any queries that produce different looking serps in MY area, but doing site: on the new DC shows results which are without the 1000 non-existant pages on one of my domains that display on default DC's.
I guess that these non-existant pages (1000 that I deleted around Jan this year) may ever so slightly effect SERPS on some queries, but generally not much as they didnt rank well anyway.
Perhaps if you are running queries on keywords with lower competition, and some duplicates/dead pages were cleaned out, then other sites will move up to fill those spots?
Thats the only difference I can now find between 66.249.93.104 and google.com (72.14.207.99 for me).
However a week or two ago it was a very different story....
After all that is what Big Daddy is all about.
For instance our site was suffering from a mix up between non www and www and only half our pages had a snipet (fully indexed)
On Big Daddy the www issue is fully sorted and all pages (including their ranking power) our now indexed properly.
The result of this is much better ranking - no update just canonically related fixes!
We seem to be going round in circles on this one.
It not an update but ranking HAS changed due to the fixes that have so far been implement by Big Daddy. Not all sites are fixed but nobody said that Big Daddy was finished with his work did they?
Agreed with that to an extent - when was your site hit/downranked - Jagger or before?
I would think that a site that is recently hit (Sept, Jagger) and has had its canonical issues resolved may see position changes as the correct PR power etc is distributed through the site.
Longer term hit sites appear to have had their PR power reduced so a Canonical fix can not lead to position changes until the next crawl/ranking update.
BTW - test DC is not showing test results as far as I can see at the moment.
Our problems were recent (sept/jagger) and I agree this may be why we have been fixed. I cannot stress how well we have been trated by Big Daddy in terms of the canonical fix. Perfect indexing to the very last page.
Steveb & Reseller,
We now know that neither of you like much of what you have seen with BD so far. That is clear. It does not help to continually repeat this fact on this thread. I am sure most others would prefer more constructive feedback.
Whether you like it or not Google are at least offering more than they have in the past and that should be welcomed.
As I have said before you me or anyone else has no idea what the SERPs will look like when Big Daddy is actually released to the default.
This is only my opinion.
GG is Matt Cutts.
Extremegolfer,
We are not here to personally identify webmasterworld members. Further, their correlation is irrelevant. Let's stay focused on the topic at hand. Matt, Googleguy, and Google itself have been very helpful to us all in recent weeks regarding their updates, changes, etc.
The serps are now squeaky clean and very representative of the industry I am in.
What Google has done since Jagger regarding feedback has produced some superb serps. During the summer I questioned Google vs Yahoo/MSN but I now think it will be impossible for anyone to produce better serps than Google in the near future. No other search engine could create such a furore when asking for feedback.
Some pretty heated stuff on here since I last looked. But then expressing oneself isn't such a bad thing :-)
Ok, back to business. The main thing I am seeing on the test DC .93.104 for my field, is a rearranging of results, so that the most important result shows above a secondary result.
By that, I mean that before, one could see two listings for the same thing, one above the other, with the second one indented, and although this continues, it is much less noticeable.
However, whereas before the results would show the path to the general theme 'widgets' first, the prime result now is the full field to the specific widget i.e. widgets-green widget.
This is an excellent move if it sticks, as it narrows the field when doing a search, and shows the specific widget being searched for.
This is my first post here. I've been following the threads for a while and learned a lot! Thank you everyone!
BigDaddy is very confusing in my own sector. I fell from page 1 to page 3 in the serps in the Jagger update. The test data centres kept me on the first page most of the time, though. Suddenly the test results have propagated to all McDar data centres, so that I'm now on p.1 everywhere! I do hope it sticks!
As for canonical issues, they seemed to have been resolved for my site on the test centres on Jan. 4,with no supplemental results and identical results on both test centres for both www and non-www. Today site:www.mydomain.com and site:mydomain.com give different results again. There are also a couple of supplemental results and several url only (no description) for pages that were shown OK on Jan. 4.
The most frightening result is that my local language sitemap (The site has an English as well as a local language version with a sitemap for each section) suddenly shows no description and no cache! This page actually used to rank very high for some searches in the local language, but today it has disappeard along with the cache. The page is of course identical to the English sitemap, but the text is in a different language and the links go to the local language version pages, so I cannot imagine that it is a duplcate pages issue.
Most of the pages seem to have a cache date of Dec. 27, but a new page that I added last week has a cache date of Jan. 1!
I don't see any sort of canonical fix, rankings are pretty much the same and in fact I have pages dissappearing on real Google and test Google.
Yup, great stuff.
I tried some other two and three word search phrases and the results rendered across all data centres seem to be much more consistent than usual! Prasctically no variation at all, whereas there used to be a lot of differences between data centres.
At times they dissapear but soon re-appear a little later. At no time can you guarantee that any DC will be showing the test results as they are removed for tweaking.
It is essential that you are sure you are seeing BD results before commenting.
Matt,For the sake of accurate feedback it would really be good if at least one Big Daddy centre was live with the new index 100% of the time.
At present 66.249.93.104 keeps switching back to default google and many people are mistaking default results for Big Daddy results and causing havoc on the forums!
You cannot ask for feedback if there are no results to feedback...
I agree with you that those of us hit last Feb lost our pr ranking power and that has caused us some major problems. Without pr you don't rank but more importantly you don't get crawled often enough.
We just started seeing the mozilla bot really start crawling within the last month and that is when we started seeing some positives in big daddy. We still arent really ranking anywhere yet though, some page 3's is the best I have seen. But we were not anywhere for most of 2005.
I am not sure we did anything to cause the changes to get the crawls. We did change all 410's to 404's. It seemed to us that googlebot sometimes just stopped after it hit them.
One other thing we changed was we often used our article descriptions as snippets in various places on our site to lead traffic.
Originally our site had one description per article and we used that above the article, in the meta, and as snippets to lead to the article. We wrote additional descriptions for each article so that they were all different.
We also slow rolled out a design change using CSS.
<edit>
[webmasterworld.com...]
It is my opinion, right or wrong, that pages with too many 'typos' get dinged automatically.
By 'typos', I mean a finger that slipped off one key and onto another.
This is very different from the folks who skipped school from 6th grade
onward to go fishing or coal mining.
In either case, Google would be nuts to avoid the spelling matter, its too easy.
Spell-check every page -Larry
Some of these people have commented that Big Daddy has sorted their canonical problems but left their page at PR0.
Can I point out that the Google toolbar uses a default datacentre for it PR display NOT the datacentre that you are searching on and certainly not the Big Daddy DC.
Therefore it is possible that your PR will return when big daddy goes live accross the DC's.
I appreciate some may have checked an accurate result on McDar but many will not have done.
Er - nope - it does depend on what DC you are accessing.
Using various tools there does not seem to be a PR update on the test dc (when it is live)
However, this fits into what MC is saying....
I stand humbly corrected.
