The Google Bigdaddy Blues (In G minor)
Well, woke up this mornin’
Page Rank was gone
Yeah, woke up this mornin’
My pretty lil’ Page Rank was gone
Well if you see my baby Page Rank
O’ please, won’t you drive it on home.
Trad. arr: Blind Lemon Brin.
(With humble apologies to any hardcore blues guys and gals reading this. 
)
Right. I’ve had countless discussions with colleagues and strangers in pubs alike about Google’s apparent determination to become a ubiquitous presence in our online lives. They (Google) sure have the avid attention of just about every web entrepreneur or code hack I know.
Google enjoys this privileged position largely thanks to:
it being the gatekeeper for an immense percentage of the immense amount of search activity carried out daily on the web;
the general dependence on Google by a great mass of site owners (yes like you and me) to attract qualified leads, enquiries and traffic to our e-commerce and advertising revenue-dependent web ventures;
naturally, the Adwords/Adsense advertising cash cow; and
the fact that the real white elephant in the corner is the immense value of the data to be mined and monetized by Google from its collection of years and years of search records, together with any associated data they’ve been able to subsequently capture, match and index. (Has any single advertiser ever held so much information/power, or been so well placed to capitalize on it into the future?)
All of these points are worth exploring, but it was the second that became most topical recently. If you didn’t already know, search engine optimization is a big industry and a deadly serious business to a great many web site owners and entrepreneurs, as you’ll see.
We pick up the story on January 4, 2006 here on Matt Cutt’s blog. ‘Bigdaddy’ is revealed to be a new Google datacentre geared for a major update of the key Google search infrastructure and algorithm. In fact, Bigdaddy was/is intended to become the default source of Google web results. Witness Matt’s responses to these questions:
Q: Do you expect this to become the default source of web results? How long will it take?
A: Yes, I do expect Bigdaddy to become the default source of web results. The length of the transition will depend on lots of different issues. Right now I’m guessing 1-2 months, but if I find out more specifics I’ll let you know.
Q: What’s new and different in Bigdaddy?
A: It has 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.
OK. So Google proceeds to roll out Bigdaddy. Then the fun begins. It seems either some of those improvements under the hood do not play nice with quite a few of the search optimization techniques and principles applied assiduously out there over recent years to an ungodly number of web sites, or there’s a major shift underway in how pages will be ranked into the near future. Actually there most likely is, but that’s another story for another day.
Fast forward to this thread over at webmasterworld.com. That gut-wrenching wailing and teeth-gnashing you can hear is coming from a great many unhappy web site owners who have placed maybe too many eggs in the Google basket. Take these comments excerpted from the thread referenced earlier - in some the desperation and angst is quite palpable:
I’ve been frantically going over all the things i can do to explain to my boss what has been going on with google. Unfortunately we have not only lost several thousand pages from googles listing but also substantial numbers from MSN and Yahoo.
Two weeks back we had 18000 total pages listed over google, yahoo, msn and alltheweb. Last week we dropped to just over 6000. Checking today we are at 5700.
and
Phah! 500,000 down to 44,300 right here! All turned supplemental after two years of good rankings. No I ain’t spam, no I ain’t scraper, no I ain’t MFA [Ed: means Made For Adsense] and no I ain’t an espotting affiliate …. even those are still ranking better than me! ….
… unless Google has raised their unique content filter to “must have at least 90% unique content” I don’t have an explanation.
Ouch. The take-home lesson is once again to build for your audience, not for the search engines. Which is not to say don’t optimize your sites for good rankings, but make sure you are catering properly for your human visitors first, not the bots and spiders.
I know, that is much the harder type of optimization to do, but the alternative it seems is to risk being left high and dry when Google decide, as they will and probably must periodically, to change direction every once in a while.
OK Blind Boy, bring it on home. One last time, with feeling …..
Well if you see my baby Page Rank
O’ please, won’t you drive it on home.
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