Google Big Daddy SearchQuake – Running ranking reports for clients is a part of an SEO’s job.

This week, I created a position report for a client, one for which we had made significant gains in ranking for their targeted search phrase, and proudly sent it to them before a scheduled conference call to discuss our progress and status.

The client sent an email after receiving the report, saying, “There is something wrong with your report – we rank higher than this report claims.” I went back to Google and typed in the search phrases to find the rankings exactly where the report had shown them the previous day.

I explained to that client that Google has, at last count, nine data centers that serve up search results. They were getting results from a data center in the Eastern US, which showed differing results from those shown to us here in California.

“So you ARE ranking better from your area of the country and that particular data center, which returns results to you. Things usually update to match in all data centers, but sometimes you may do better in one data center than in others. If you search from each IP address in that list discussed in the forum linked above, you’ll see different rankings and may find datacenters where you rank at the bottom of page two of results.”

You might also search from that new “Big Daddy” data center referenced in that article above, which discusses upcoming Google ranking algorithm changes due soon.

It’s a measure of where you might expect to be when Google updates its algorithm for all data centers

The upcoming change in algorithm and the interestingly named server, “Big Daddy,” were publicly posted on Matt Cutts’ blog for beta testing by SEOs (and other Google Watchers) who read him regularly. (For those who don’t know, Cutts is a software engineer at Google & shares SEO tips on his blog) http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Of course, this news was a bit much for the client to take in all at once. He had little time to read the articles I referenced in my note above, but it was enough to assure him that I knew what I was talking about and explain the differences in my report and his keyword searches at the end of the country. It’s a bit odd to try to explain to a client, “There are different Googles.” Few know or understand this.

Another issue arose later in the day when I conducted further research for a different client and discovered, while we were speaking on the phone, that his results differed from mine on specific query operator searches.

We were using the “site: businessdomain.com” query operator and the “allinurl:pick-your-own-URL” query operator to limit search results, but we got vastly different numbers of results and rankings for the exact searches.

The first stunning thing in this example was that we are less than 25 miles apart in Southern California. The second shocker was that I tried simply hitting the “Search” button again after getting the first results page, and things changed again! All of this happening in a single day makes me think that some results are being percolated as Google eases into an algorithm change.

Perhaps this is not unusual, but in seven years of this work, I haven’t seen the volatility noted in January 2006. Are we about to have a major SearchQuake? Is Google about to split the earth and spew volcanic new results? Stand by for the BigDaddy SearchQuake sometime this month or next.

Posted by Mike Banks Valentine