Being a Bigdaddy Jagger Meister

It took a little while to start to figure it out. Such things almost always do. After months of observation, research, discussion and debate, Search Engine Optimization experts appear to be getting a better handle on the effects of Google's Bigdaddy infrastructure upgrades. From mid-winter until this week, StepForth has strongly advised our clients to be conservative with any changes to their sites until enough time has passed for us, along with many others in the SEO community to observe, analyze and articulate our impressions of the upgrade. About ten days ago, the light at the end of the intellectual tunnel became eminently visible and SEO discussion forums are abuzz with productive and proactive conversations regarding how to deal with a post-Bigdaddy Google environment. To make the long back-story short, in September 2005, Google began implementation of a three-part algorithm update that became known as the Jagger Update. Shortly after completing the algo update in late November, Google began an upgrading of their server and data storage network that was dubbed the Bigdaddy Infrastructure Upgrade. The Bigdaddy upgrade took several months to completely roll out across all of Google's data centers, which are rumoured to number in the hundreds. In other words, the world's most popular search engine has, in one way or another, been in a constant state of flux since September. The only solid information SEOs had to pass on to curious clients amounted to time tested truisms about good content, links and site structure. Being the responsible sort we are, no good SEO wanted to say anything definite for fear of being downright wrong and misdirecting others. Starting in the middle of May and increasing towards the end of the month, ideas and theories that had been thrown around SEO related forums and discussion groups started to solidify into the functional knowledge that makes up the intellectual inventory of good SEO firms. Guided by the timely information leaks from Google's quality control czar WebMasterWorld , SEW ( ) ( ) ( ), Aaron Wall , Mark Daoust have also added their observations to the conversation in a number of separate articles. By now, most good SEOs should be able to put their fingers on issues related to Bigdaddy fairly quickly and help work out a strategy for sites that were adversely affected by the upgrade. The first thing to note about the cumulative effects of Jagger and Bigdaddy is the intent of Google engineers to remove much of the poor quality or outright spammy commercial content that was clogging up their search results. The intended targets of the Bigdaddy update go beyond sites that commit simple violations against Google's webmaster guidelines to include affiliate sites, results gleaned from other search tools, duplicate content, poor quality sites and sites with obviously gamey link networks. In some cases, Google was targeting sites designed primarily to attract users to click on paid-search advertisements. After the implementation of the algo update and infrastructure upgrades, SEOs have seen changes in the following areas: Site/Document Quality Scoring, Duplicate Content Filtering and Link Intention Analysis. The first area noted is site or document quality scoring. Did you know there are now more web documents online than there are people on the planet? Many if not most of those documents are highly professional and some are sort of scrappy. While Google is not looking for perfection, it is trying to assess which pages are more useful than others and attention to quality design and content is one of the criteria. Quality design simply means giving Google full access to all areas of the site webmasters want spidered. Smart site and directory structures tend to place spiderable information as high in the directory tree as possible. While Google is capable of spidering deeply into database sites, it appears to prefer to visit higher level directories much more frequently. We have noted that Google agent visits do tend to correspond with update times set via Google Sitemaps. Accessibility and usability issues are thought to make up elements of the Jagger algorithm update, marking the way visitors use a site or document and the amount of time they spend engaged in a user-session associated with a site important factors in ranking and placement outcomes. Internal and outbound links should be placed with care in order to make navigating through and away from a site as easy as possible for site visitors. Another quality design issue involves letting Google know which "version" of your site is the correct one. For most, a website can be access with or without typing the "www" part of the URL. (ie: http://stepforth.com , Del.icio.us") | Yahoo My Web Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of