A while ago Matt Cutts of Google, indicated that Google would be making some hardware changes and it may have an impact on search results. It has turned out to be a larger project than I anticipated, and the search results are so impacted that the project has a name - Big Daddy.

What does Big Daddy mean to you? It can impact your results in several ways. For starters, Matt mentioned on his blog a while ago that Google engineers tended to try things out during the week so they could tweak any problems that arose and usually went back to the pre- Big Daddy results on the weekends.

This means that if you monitor your rank or saturation you may see some differences between a weekday and a weekend.

There are several datacenters that return Google search results. Every time you do a search, your results could be coming from a different data center without your knowing. There are several sites out there that publish the different Google datacenters

I won’t go into details about different datacenters here but instead will point out what you might see:

• if you are trying to determine your saturation or how many pages you have indexed, you may find that using a tool such as Market Leap, returns a different set of numbers compared to your doing a search at Google yourself. This may be attributable to the Market Leap tool using a different datacenter than what you are seeing. If Market Leap shows a higher number of pages indexed than what you see, this is good news. You need to continue optimizing your site and ensuring your pages are spiderable, but it looks like you might see an increase in saturation down the road.
• try your search using site:www.site.com as well as site:site.com. I accidently did a search without the site: and saw different results! For the website in question, most data centers returned 1 indexed page without a description. A query of thatsite.com returned 2 indexed pages along with a description for one! Good news for sure and it would appear that to continue working on the site will bring important changes
• backlinks will vary. Many SEOs tend to rely on Yahoo! for backlinks since Google does not show all backlinks and tends to update their backlinks every three months
• rankings for various keyword phrases will vary widly from what I can see. There is nothing you can do about this other than to be sure you have optimized for a VARIETY of phrases and hope that one of these phrases always comes up for someones search in some part of the world :-)

On that note, I need to go and be sure to optimize for more phrases on a clients website!

Read more about Google Data Centers at McDar or check your results at a few different data centers using the McDar Datacenter Quick Check tool.

You may also want to keep an eye on Matt Cutts blog or the forums at Webmaster World or High Rankings.

A while ago Matt Cutts of Google, indicated that Google would be making some hardware changes and it may have an impact on search results. It has turned out to be a larger project than I anticipated, and the search results are so impacted that the project has a name - Big Daddy.

What does Big Daddy mean to you? It can impact your results in several ways. For starters, Matt mentioned on his blog a while ago that Google engineers tended to try things out during the week so they could tweak any problems that arose and usually went back to the pre- Big Daddy results on the weekends.

This means that if you monitor your rank or saturation you may see some differences between a weekday and a weekend.

There are several datacenters that return Google search results. Every time you do a search, your results could be coming from a different data center without your knowing. There are several sites out there that publish the different Google datacenters

I won’t go into details about different datacenters here but instead will point out what you might see:

• if you are trying to determine your saturation or how many pages you have indexed, you may find that using a tool such as Market Leap, returns a different set of numbers compared to your doing a search at Google yourself. This may be attributable to the Market Leap tool using a different datacenter than what you are seeing. If Market Leap shows a higher number of pages indexed than what you see, this is good news. You need to continue optimizing your site and ensuring your pages are spiderable, but it looks like you might see an increase in saturation down the road.
• try your search using site:www.site.com as well as site:site.com. I accidently did a search without the site: and saw different results! For the website in question, most data centers returned 1 indexed page without a description. A query of thatsite.com returned 2 indexed pages along with a description for one! Good news for sure and it would appear that to continue working on the site will bring important changes
• backlinks will vary. Many SEOs tend to rely on Yahoo! for backlinks since Google does not show all backlinks and tends to update their backlinks every three months
• rankings for various keyword phrases will vary widly from what I can see. There is nothing you can do about this other than to be sure you have optimized for a VARIETY of phrases and hope that one of these phrases always comes up for someones search in some part of the world :-)

On that note, I need to go and be sure to optimize for more phrases on a clients website!

Read more about Google Data Centers at McDar or check your results at a few different data centers using the McDar Datacenter Quick Check tool.

You may also want to keep an eye on Matt Cutts blog or the forums at Webmaster World or High Rankings.