Google's BigDaddy Switchover

In early 2006, Google rolled out it's "BigDaddy" upgrade. BigDaddy is a major change to Google's datacenters. 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. Word at the end of March is that the upgrade is pretty much complete.

The BigDaddy upgrade improves search results in several ways:

1. Redirects. Upgrades in the behavior of the search engine when it is dealing with redirects as they pertain to result relevance and page hijacking. There are two types of redirects -- permanent (301) and temporary (302). Permanent redirects (301) tell search engines that a page has been permanently moved to a new location, and are easily handled by search engines. Temporary redirects (302) are a bit trickier to handle, and have been a problem for Google in the past. If you are using temporary redirects, the BigDaddy upgrade will help Google handle them more effectively.
2. URL Canonicalization. The BigDaddy upgrade helps to consolidate your inbound links by treating these URLs as the same:
   • http://seoadept.com
   • http://www.seoadept.com
   • http://sepadept.com/
   • http://www.seoadept.com/
   Prior to BigDaddy, these were treated as four different links, and for purposes of inbound linking, it was very important to use the same variation everywhere in order to maximize your ranking.
3. New Google Spider. The BigDaddy upgrade is based on creating a new search index, which has been built by a new spider, currently knows as "Mozilla Bot". The new spider crawls websites faster and creates a "smarter" index.
4. Improved Results. The new infrastructure in place after the BigDaddy upgrade will allow Google to develop more advanced algorithms and larger databases. It will also make it easier for Google to index different types of content in the future.

The BigDaddy upgrade will help Google improve the quality of their search results, which should increase their already substantial lead in the search engine race, which will make them more important than ever in your SEO efforts.