Have you noticed anything different with Google lately? The Webmaster community certainly has, and if recent talk on several search engine optimization (SEO) forums is an indicator, Webmasters are very frustrated. For approximately two years Google has introduced a series of algorithm and filter changes that have led to unpredictable search engine results, and many clean (non-spam) websites have been dropped from the rankings. Google updates used to be monthly, and then quarterly. Now with so many servers, there seems to be several different search engine results rolling through the servers at any time during a quarter. Part of this is the recent Big Daddy update, which is a Google infrastructure update as much as an algorithm update. We believe Big Daddy is using a 64 bit architecture. Pages seem to go from a first page ranking to a spot on the 100th page, or worse yet to the Supplemental index. Google algorithm changes started in November 2003 with the Florida update, which now ranks as a legendary event in the Webmaster community. Then came updates named Austin, Brandy, Bourbon, and Jagger. Now we are dealing with the BigDaddy!

The algorithm problems seem to fall into 4 categories. There are canonical issues, duplicate content issues, the Sandbox, and supplemental page issues.

1. Canonical Issues: these occur when a search engine treats www.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com, and yourdomain.com/index.html all as different websites. When Google does this, it then flags the different copies as duplicate content and penalizes them. Also, if the site not penalized is http://yourdomain.com, but all of the websites link to your website using www.yourdomain.com, then the version left in the index will have no ranking. These are basic issues that other major search engines, such as Yahoo and MSN, have no problem dealing with. Google is possibly the greatest search engine in the world (ranking themselves as a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10). They provide tremendous results for a wide range of topics, and yet they cannot get some basic indexing issues resolved.

2. The Sandbox: this has become one of the legends of the search engine world. It appears that websites, or links to them, are