The Big Daddy Mess

This month I noticed a fair decrease in traffic. Upon further inspection I realized that Google had for the most part dropped all the pages for this site from its index. Bummer. Poking around at my code, I thought maybe it was because I inadvertently put a "no cache" tag on each page. I honestly didn't mean to. It must have made it into my include file by mistake. And while this shouldn't be an issue, I had heard in the past that certain search engines might not like the tag. I had also released a redesign with a directory structure update (about half the URLs had to be 301 redirected). Nope, that probably wasn't it either because the pages that didn’t change URLs also went MIA. It seems that with Big Daddy, the rules changed (somewhat as expected) but to the extent the rules changed is another story.

Back when the first Big Daddy beta location (or whatever you want to call it) was announced, I checked it out and saw that very few of my pages were in the index. From what I read, it indicated not to worry that the full indexing wasn't done yet. Ok, no need to raise the red flag or anything, just be patient.

It seems that's about the extent of indexing I'm going to see from Big Daddy after all. Ugh. Despite trying to gain backlinks, the old PR4 is now like a PR1. In the past, you'd see people in forums saying their month old site wasn't indexed yet. They had no backlinks (or maybe 2) so the first response was work on getting more backlinks and the rest should follow with time. The number of backlinks (quality is more important than quantity but you need more than a couple quality backlinks to reach presence in the index), seems to have changed dramatically.

The Google-people said they didn't really hear much negative feedback during the beta process but now I'm wondering if the ramifications were not sufficiently understood a few months ago so critical feedback was held back until now.

From a webmaster's perspective this is frustrating because the Google-people are saying focus on content and get natural links, but to get natural links people need to know about your site somehow (search results maybe), but to get in the search results to get more natural backlinks you need backlinks. It's like the catch-22 of needing experience to get a job but you need a job to get experience.

But also think about this from the Joe User perspective. I need to find information on a fairly obscure topic (maybe a kooky unexplainable car problem). Unless the site that happens to publish information about the problem is "highly linked" I'm probably out of luck on finding information when it comes to Google. I don’t disagree that there needs to be a balance between junk sites that just scrape content, but are you 100% positive that sites with few backlinks aren't actually sufficiently relative or useful? This concept may work for popular topics where there's a gazillion references on the subject and some sort of filtering is necessary but what about the obscure stuff? I'm not even talking about the small mom-and-pop sites that cater to local people that just want to be found when someone searches by town and specialty. Their backlink percentages are probably small too. It's rather unfortunate that useful sites are not being deemed so because of backlinking numbers.

It really is a catch-22 and I don't know if there's a good answer yet. Bugs are one thing (there were a few reported) but the logic just seems kooky.

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