Google Datacenters Watch: 2006-01-30

Observations, Analysis and Remarks

[johnwards]

< continued from [webmasterworld.com...] >

This is just odd.

The 64.* DC's return about 300 pages from my site.

The 216.* DC's return about 46,000 pages from my site.

And the 66.* return 69,000 pages from my site.

Currently I have about 65,000 pages.

If I go to google.co.uk I get 46,000 pages. If I go to google.com from my US based server I get the same 46,000 results.

It is all very odd and confusing.

[edited by: tedster at 9:56 pm (utc) on Jan. 30, 2006]

[cleanup]

Just a word about the new BD infrastructure, mainly to Dayo_UK and anyone else with 301/canonical issues.

I have been seeing as others have reported a slight churning and movement, with a few more pages getting corrected.

I have not seen a definate fix yet but maybe a few positive signs like;

One or two of may pages that were picked and and listed with the "301 - this pages has moved..." have been corrected. Not much in itself but a positive sign I suppose.

I see an increasing number of DCs heading in the right direction.

More interestingly.. some of my pages that are being listed - incorrectly - at the moment, with the only content being.. "301 - this pages has moved..." are now ranking again for their terms.. even though the caption text in google is still the "301 - this page has moved..". strange..

Anyway, I suppose the point of this post, after so many negative posts or the past months is to confirm that there *MAY* be some movement now in the right direction.

Lets hope so ;)

[edited by: cleanup at 9:37 am (utc) on Feb. 5, 2006]

[reseller]

The New Serps on BigDaddy DCs

Good morning Folks

IMO, the most important element in Google Datacenters Watching is to have an open mind and think without restrictions or pre-assumptions about possible and impossible scenarios. This way we would be able to observe changes as they are, analysing as to the best of our knowledge and posting our remarks and hereby speaking our minds. I.e free thoughts, free analysis and freely speaking our minds are essential elements of DCs watching. ALL DONE IN GOOD FAITH.

Accordingly, I have noticed BigDaddy DCs serps have changed, within my testing keyphrases and the sectors I watch, since 3rd. February 2006.

Agreed, the current situation mightbe confusing. On one hand we have Google introducing new infrastructure which was supposed not to affect ranking. But changes in ranking are exactly what some of us see at present on BigDaddy DCs.

We have been told by my hero Matt "Inigo" Cutts that he considers "a switch over to a new piece of infrastructure" as an UPDATE.
Later, the same hero wrote that BigDaddy is a switch over to a new infrastructure, but it shouldn't be regarded as an UPDATE!

Confused? you bet I am :-)

Back to DCs watching. BigDaddy is spreading to several more DCs in addition to what Inigo's has mentioned:

"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."

However, Inigo wrote also:

"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."

Fair enough, Inigo. It could be the DCs are converting to BigDaddy in more speedy manner than you have expected. And I'm buying :-)

I wish you all a great Sunday.

[followgreg]

>>"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."

Hey BTW, this could take a long time! How many DC do they have again?

[aldo]

mcdar tool shows at the moment 28 DC's with BD
and 25 DC's with default Google

[Ellio]

>>>mcdar tool shows at the moment 28 DC's with BD
and 25 DC's with default Google <<,

Just checked myself and there are definately as many Big Daddy DC's as Default DC's now.

Its rolling out quite fast at this rate we will be 100% Big Daddy before the end of February.

[Ellio]

Google.co.uk has been using [72.14.207.104...] as the default DC for over a week.

This DC is not listed by McDar does anybody have any info on the 72.14.207 C-Block?

[Markoi]

A lot of DC's down?

[otech]

I assume you guys are using the sf giants search to determine BD dc's..

Just a thought, has anyone figured out, or does anyone care to guess why this search would be changed under BD?

They both have the same title, (www.sfgiants.com & giants.mlb.com)

So, has anyone figured out why this BD has this effect on those URLS rankings?

By the way, if it was literaly just a move to 64bit as some people suggest, why would SERPS be any different? MSN network & microsoft in general moved to 64 bit, and it didnt cause any changes... Its a bit too low level for it to have a SERP effect dont you think?

I think must be, at least in part, an 'algorithmic' change to the infrastructure (infrastructure change is a pretty broad term) for it to change rankings of sites, right?

So, does basically what do we KNOW about BD beyond the 'canonicals / redirects' attempted fixes?

[paintbox]

In order to find out why the search for sf giants is such a good test for BD, I did a search for site:www.giants.mlb.com on BD and non BD. This site has really undergone a major canonical fix! 34 pages listed on non BD, all supplemental, 204 on BD, none supplemental! The site does not appear in serps on non-BD, but is no. 1 on BD, which means the canonical fix has also had a dramatic effect on its serp placement.

[Marval]

noted one canonical issue that doesnt seem to have been addressed so far in my watching. It concerns the use of a country domain that allows the use of dot com as a part of the subdirectory structure. An example would be when I do a site:mysite.com I still see pages that are assigned to my domain of the following structure:
www.someotherdomain.tk.mydomain.com/page.html
BD is not handling those as other domains, although because they are dupe pages they do assign supplemental status to them and leave the real page as an "original" page.
I submitted them as a spam report some time back but have resubmitted them with Matts recommended added phrase as of yesterday.
The rest of the canonical issues Ive looked at that Ive had in the past do seem to be handled correctly now although I am still testing the ServerName tag in Apache to see if the problem that existed with the relative path directories has been fixed.