Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I don't want to rub salt in the wounds of those who have had their sites decimated by Big Daddy, but perhaps it is time to talk about the positive effects. If you read the BD and SH threads here you get the idea that there has been nothing good as a result of this 'infrastructure change'. Indeed it is understood that this change just paves the way for future improvements and is not supposed to be considered an update itself. I know that there have been many others who have had their rankings improve and have had an increase in traffic several fold as a result of Big Daddy. Do we understand what the common denominators are for those sites?
So far we have pretty much only heard from those who have been hurt by Big Daddy, surely there is a percentage that has improved in the rankings. Any guess as to what that percentage is? Of the sites that I am personally aware of, I haven't seen any hurt by BD, and I've seen a few which have had an incredible increase in traffic.
What have you seen that has gone right with Big Daddy?
1. It seems that snippets (description) is better. Google now in most cases just gets it from my meta description tag probably because I try my best to make the description relevant.
2. Since I am software author I cursed Google for the situation when the pages in download sites (directories) with my software were higher in SERP than my own page. Now it seems fixed. I understand that it is bad for the download sites but I believe that it at least fair.
3. Two my pages (from about 300) went to supplemental but frankly speaking they deserved it. I even glad that people don't find them because it would not be the best first impression from my site. These two pages were not significant and have not been updated for years. So, yes they are legitimate pages with 4 year history but I am glad that they are supplemental because they deserve it. I am going to update them soon and than we see what will happen.
The bottom line is that the same things that are bad for one group of sites are actually better for another group of sites. For me they are slightly better, not much better but still it is pleasant.
Vadim.
What have you seen that has gone right with Big Daddy?
1. - Like you, my traffic from Google is up. Overall site traffic has doubled this month and Google referals are up four fold.
2. - The ranking of pages seems better in BD - I'm talking about when the site: command is used.
3. - If the RK values are future page rank, that was also a plus for me. I show PR5 on the toolbar, but the RK value was 6.
4. - There still remains one "downside" experience and that has to do with pages index. I'm still missing about 300 pages (30%) from the index. But I had a heavy crawl on Friday that continues this morning. That should clean up the missing pages.
Concensus says that BD has almost, if not completely, rolled out, but there are outstanding equations to take into account,such as a forthcoming PR and BL update,which may well happen in the relatively near future.
Also, it appears that there are outstanding factors that need to be taken into consideration,such as the supplemental issue, which has by no means been dealt with so far.
Increased traffic can come from a variety of factors, such as new pages being indexed, old pages being reindexed, possibly the new infrastructure, more AdWords hits, etc.
The BD data centres are still varying considerably from one to another, and nobody is certain if they have affected country specific DC's yet. So, dpending on whatis the default DC for any given area, the results may be favourable or to the contrary for websites.
Don't get me wrong, as my traffic is up 50% on last month, but I wouldn't like to say that BD has influenced that in any way.
This has been the best month I have ever had. Traffic is at 10 month high, rankings are where they should be historically and also better in some cases.
I have held off from posting about it for the past few weeks because I waswaiting to see, but overall I am in better shape this month than all winter..It was a lose winter for me and google, very stressful indeed.
What have you seen that has gone right with Big Daddy?
So far, at least, Big Daddy has been a non-event for my travel-planning site.
Rankings are mostly the same or about the same as they were before the BD rollout, and my competitors' rankings also look about the same for the keywords and keyphrases that I watch.
[edited by: europeforvisitors at 5:12 pm (utc) on Mar. 26, 2006]
The things I see causing problems on other sites that I don't utilize:
My site does not use Javascript for navigation
I don't use session IDs
I don't use flash or any other fancy technological gadget
When I've had my site reviewd I'm usually told it looks too 90s.
However, I'm so busy I'm turning down one job a day.
This was another very positive coming out of BigDaddy. The fact that all of those supplementals were revealed helped me develop a plan for "eliminating" them and stopping additional supplementals from appearing in the future. If you ever wanted to know all the "dirt" google had on your website, BigDaddy was a present.
I've been told that as well, and, ok, it's true.
The target audience doesn't complain, even when a new look/feel was also rahter 90's. It's also true the site sits high & has since fixing a self inflicted site injury back around the May/June 2003 time frame.
I suppose I could make it look '06ish but all things considered, I rather like the 90's. :)
My sites consist of mainly of unique content articles on a variety of different subjects.
Now is it making the phone ring...:( No.
Our secondary site has now become our primary money earner and traffic site since Big Daddy started rolling out. By the looks of things, with the completion of the final 2 DC's, our traffic will be up 10x on this one site.
This site is a fairly large site with about 150,000 pages of user-generated content, and we've never seen a page in the supplemental index.
We don't track rankings, but we do monitor traffic closely. The funny thing is that we could tell each time a new DC was updated with BD because of new records being set in traffic levels. It's going to be hard to not have record-breaking days every week now that that rollout is over.
Care to share?
2. small site 1 with 3-4 directory links max - was supplemental, back, gone again now.
3. small site 2 with directory 10-20 links max - supplemental, back, supplemental, now back. Who knows about tomorrow.
4. very new domain and niche site, good natural links, never supplemental, and now all pages except 1 vanishes from SERPS. Only homepage visible for site: search.
I dont know what to make of it all - G behaving somewhat like how an unruly puppy. Or God.
If things remain stable for me - as I expect - I will definitely post my comments here in a few days or weeks. But I don't know what exactly you were aiming at:
> What have you seen that has gone right with Big Daddy?
Do you mean search results for the major keywords I target at, or do you mean my general experiences in doing research on any given topic? Maybe we should clarify this issue before the hurricane begins.
Do you mean search results for the major keywords I target at, or do you mean my general experiences in doing research on any given topic? Maybe we should clarify this issue before the hurricane begins.
I understand that most webmasters consider an update good or bad depending on if their website traffic has gone up or down. None of the web sites that I have a personal connection with have been hurt by Big Daddy so I have a hard time imagining that what we've seen so far has been all bad.
I'd like to hear from other webmasters who have had their traffic increased by Big Daddy, and their theories as to why their sites have seen an increase in traffic when so many others have seen a decrease.
BD update showed me an error were I was creating duplicate pages on my site.
I went supplemental Total site except for home page. I completely reworked the site deleted the duplicate pages. I completely removed all the content from the pages 600-700 of them and added this text
Page has been deleted Duplicate Content Please go to Web Site Link Home Page. Thanks This is to keep the page from causing link rot.
Valaditaed the complete site E commerce Site with 1000 products totally htm and waited.
Site was removed from supplemental index a short time after completion. The total pages indexed now are correct ranking have been moving in a very postitve diection not Only in Google but MSN and Yahoo as well.
BD update showed me were I was really causing all the issues myself. It was an honest stupid mistake but the bot doesn't know that and I am grateful God has given me the ability to see the problem and the wisdom and strength to get it fixed.
It wasn't an easy fix spent 100's of hours getting all my links from ../ to hard links. Cleaning up all the code on every page to validate etc. Every link on my entire site is now fixed so there can be no issue with the www and non www.
BD update has caused me to completely rework relook rethink all I do in SEO.
I really feel there are allot of webamsters needing to do the same for their sites, sometimes it is easier to complain than to see our own weakness.
My experience - content-rich pages with no e-business content - has been positive. Either where I was before or slight improvements. Some things are a bit odd - there seems to be a new and very temporary "updated page penalty".
I don't think it's right to say that "so many others" have seen a decrease. Remember how many webmasters there are in the world - if even 1% posted on Usenet it would look like a storm.
Normally its the META title, then the description is either from DMOZ, or the META, or from content.
In this case we don't even have the same words on the page thats listed, nor is it in the META tags.
Anyone have any ideas on where else they might be pulling this title from?
