Can big daddy have such a big affect

googles big daddy

[steveBSc1ouk]

Hi,

I have a website <snip>, and over the past couple of
months there have been periods where all the good rankings that we have
achieved virtually disappear. Then out of the blue the rankings
reappear....and then a few days later disappear again.

Does anybody have any idea why this should happen. We are not making
any crazy changes to the website itself, but we did change the domain
name back in November 2005.

I initially thought it may be to do with the domain name change, but
our rankings are still appearing/disappearing every to 10 days.

Does google look down on one site redirecting to another. namely <someother> to <ours>?

Any thoughts/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

Kam

[edited by: trillianjedi at 9:07 am (utc) on April 5, 2006]
[edit reason] TOS [/edit]

[Vadim]

It may be the million of reasons why it may happen.

For example, you may have many competitors with very close rank. In this case even small change in rank may mean high change in SERP. I would rather read Google webmaster guidelines, this thread and improve the site quality than think about the reasons. As wrote one good author, "all happy families are alike while all unhappy ones have their own reason". It seems more practical to study the happy families.

Vadim.

[Hissingsid]

I wouls wait and listen to someone who knows what they are talking about.

I don't claim to be an expert but it seems clear to me that BD could have caused what you describe. If you are just checking on your default google.co* then the changes may well be caused by the phased introduction of BD data centre by data centre. One time that you check you see results from one data centre and the next from another. We are told that all of the DCs are BD now but ss the engineers find and fix bugs there is a new rotation as the bug fix is passed on to the data centres. I for one think that it will take some time for things to settle down and it may be best for you to wait for this to happen before worrying about your site content or structure.

Best wishes

Sid

[tedster]

Yes, during those long weeks while Big Daddy was rolling out, the live results were often shifting from one data center to another, and the data sets involved were often quite different.

Does google look down on one site redirecting to another.

It depends on how the redirect is being accomplished technically. If it is done with a 301 moved [Permanent] there should be no problem. However, any other way -- 302 moved [Temporary], meta refresh, javascript reassigning the location.href, 100% framesets etc, can lead into some painful territory as the Google algorithm chews on the spidering results.

Also, a new domain (and Nov 2005 is not so very long ago) can still be seeing the effects that are called the sandbox effect -- a combination of Google filters than can slow down a site's ability to be seen in the search results for frequently searched keywords. The content itself is not the measure of "new", but the domain name itself is.

[tedster]

By the way, as a general rule switching to a new domain name for an established business is almost always a bumpy ride. It's not for the faint of heart, or because there's a casual need to "rebrand". This forum holds many tales of woe that came with changing the domain name.

In my opinion, there should be a compelling business need to make the move, and also a plan to deal with a big dip in search traffic for a few months after the change.

[Dayo_UK]

Hi steveBSc1ouk

A good place to start when your site has dropped for no apparent reason is to check that you have not got Canonical problems.

If your site has pages listed under the non-www. EG: site:domain.com -www or you have different pagerank on the non-www to the www then there could be problems.

Google seems to have problems in this area and you may find that you can not even appear for results such as a "www.domain.com" phrase search in the results.

There has been a number of posts regarding the Canonical issues that you can research here and accross the web if it appears that this is your problem.

Google are supposed to be attempting to fix this issue - so you may just need to wait it out another month or so.

Cheers

Dayo

[tedster]

Good suggestion, Dayo.

We have a few threads that looked into canonical and other issues -- the threads below are all worth working your way through if you have Google troubles that you can't understand:

Checklist for Sudden Drops in Rank [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped from Google - a checklist to find out why [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com]

[guru5571]

I have this exact same problem. I'm not worried though. I have literally been through this up and down cycle now at least 10 times. The one positive thing is that each time I come back, my search traffic comes back even stronger than before. My site is less than a year old, so I'm not sure if it may be BD switching out or trying to merge the old and new index or what. All I know is it ratchets up and down. Almost like clock-work. My page counts rachet up and down along with referral traffic. I would guess a full up and down cycle takes about 2 weeks for my site. At this moment I am at the absolute bottom of the cycle. They've squeezed off the tap almost as dry as it will go, so I expect the worm to start turning in these next days.

[trinorthlighting]

The data centers seem to be stabilizing for my sites, my traffic has slowly been picking up. The worse is over with.

[guru5571]

I'm coming back too.

[300m]

I seem to be having a problem that is kind of on topic.

I have 2 domains 301'd to the main domain that is also 301'd with the www. and I keep popping in and out of the serps. The site age would not be a factor as its 7 years old. I have checked my link structure out, seems to be ok. Duplicate content is not an issue either. What is irritating to me is that its not one or 2 pages that drop, its the better part of 200+ pages. One day their in the rightr positions and then out of nowhere it drops to 9999 (according to kw ranking monitor on DP).

I think that google has improved the 301 process for the www and non www, but I think more and more that they are having a problem with the above stated 301 issue.

I am not 100% sure that is what is causing the issue, but I have other sites that I have 301'd and they do not have multiple domains mapped, 301'd to them at all. Only 301 for the www and non www.

I would love to drop the 2 additional domains, but they make up for a good amount of backlinks to the site, so that is not going to happen.

Also, when I use the site operator for those 2 domains in question, they are indexed in Google, but as supplimental results. That makes sense considering that I have the 301 in place, but what does not make sense to me is that those 2 301'd domains are the ONLY pages that hold rankings consistently throughout the past 10 months.

I know some would say, just change the 301 to one of those domains and see what happens. I would, but the thing is that the majority of backlinks for the primary domain far exceed those of the 2 301'd domains.

If anyone has a similar issue i would like to hear about it.

thanks.