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That’s right, Google has been testing new infrastructure according to Matt Cutts.  While he’s careful to say that the new datacenter isn’t an algorithm change he does say that some sites will be affected by the new system

In this article I look at some of the issues with BigDaddy and outline what webmasters can expect in the coming months.

Well it appears that Matt has been busy.  There hasn’t been too much activity on his blog for a few days now, what with the holidays and other stuff and today he lets loose with a whole bunch of posts.  One of the posts caught my eye.  It was a reference to “BigDaddy” and a new data center.

Last month Matt Cutts mentioned that there was a new datacenter Google was testing, however he didn’t get into too many details about what it was or why they were testing it.Today, he unveiled it in his blog. In it he explains what BigDaddy is and isn’t.

What BigDaddy isn’t

For one thing, BigDaddy ISN’T a new algorithm. But it is a new foundation for Google. In other words, this new datacenter contains new code that will be rolled out to the other datacenters in the coming months to help improve Google.

While some are reporting that they are seeing different results on the datacenter Matt insists that is more a case of the changing infrastructure than an actual algorithm shift which we normally associate with a Google update.

That means that when this new code is pushed live to the other servers we will see an update to Google, however it won’t be attributed to an algorithm as has previously happened.

So what does BigDaddy do?

Well, according to Matt’s blog, it solves some long standing issues with Google. Issues which have frustrated webmasters and site owners for years.

The biggest change seems to be that the “data center lays the groundwork for better canonicalization.”

Canonicalization issues have been big with Google and really all the engines. Canonical issues are ones where the engines can’t tell that:

www.yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com
yourdomain.com/index.html
www.yourdomain.com/index.html

Are in fact all the same site.

You see, search engines look at every URL as unique. That means that even though the above 4 pages are the same to humans, the engines see them as different.

So what Google has set out to do with BigDaddy is work towards solving the issue so that even if it comes across these 4 URLs it will know that they are the same and will attribute all factors to one URL.

Typically, site owners and webmasters have had to work around this shortcoming by configuring web servers to force Google and other engines to recognize the URL’s as the same. That means implementing 301 redirects on domains and ensuring that all site links (and even incoming links) are consistently pointed at a single domain.  In most cases, the web server is told to tell all requests coming to yourdomain.com to be automatically (and permanently) redirected to www.yourdomain.com

What about other redirects?

Speaking of redirects, the new datacenter format will also be better able to handle 301 and 302 redirects.

301’s haven’t necessarily been an issue in that Google has been able to follow them and associate the 301 properly, however there have been issues with 302 redirects. In particular there have been documented cases where some sites are using 302’s to hijack other sites.

Domains would use a 302 redirect to “grab” content from other sites and associate it with their own.

For example, if you were to put up a site and put a 302 redirect on it to www.google.com your site would actually pull the homepage from Google.com and display it as if it were your own. Some unscrupulous site owners would use such a tactic to pull good content from other sites and claim ownership of it (via the 302) and in some cases they’d even outrank the owner of the content!

Google’s new infrastructure is supposed to be able to deal with these issues better, understanding when a 302 is used for hijacking purposes versus other legitimate reasons.

For example, one could use a 302 redirect to redisplay:

www.yoursite.com/index.php?sid=234234890q45r&page=2342342fa as www.yoursite.com

Notice that the second URL is much more user friendly while the upper one is not so search engine friendly. In this case, it’s a good 302 redirect, the site owner is changing from an unfriendly URL to a friendly one using such a redirect. But as mentioned above, some people have abused this by using similar tactics to steal content.

Of course there are other issues that BigDaddy will solve, in addition to future improvements, but for now I think just solving these 2 issues, both are major headaches to those in the online community, will greatly help clean up and improve the index.

I guess only time will tell how well they do at solving these problems.

Rob Sullivan is a SEO Consultant and Writer for Textlinkbrokers.com