Google Acknowledges Big Daddy Chaos - Barry Schwartz

Is the SERP trouble webmasters are reporting after Google's Big Daddy Update a "Storage Crisis"?

Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) describes Google as having a storage or "machine crisis" basically noting that the machines are full.

Schwartz attributes the problems with the Big Daddy update as being related to:

• inconsistent indexing/dropping of pages
• slow or no crawling activity
• old cached pages
• dead 404 pages returned in the search results
• irrelevant results

Notes on vBSEO:

• Like other webmasters, vBSEO users often report fluctuations in their indexed pages and ranking for various keyword phrases. The Big Daddy update created a much higher volume of reports.

For Discussion

• What has your Google Big Daddy Experience? Were you a spared by good fortune?
• When changes with the search results (and problems) are a Google issue, webmasters should be careful not to be too reactive. That is, don't write off an SEO technique as invalid because you are not happy with the short-term results. SEO is a moving target - and the Google Big Daddy update is making hitting the mark an extremely difficult task. The winners will be those who tough it out.

Source:
Google Results Suffering After "Big Daddy" Update?

Well that would explain why the indexed page count for The Staff Lounge has been fluctuating quite alot these past couple of days, almost as though Google couldn't quite decide which pages where actually live on my website O_o

I couldnt agree more with your last discussion point, SEO is often a game of waiting and patience, you cant be expected to make a slight change to the word order of your <title> to assign more weight to a important keyword and then expect to immediately have a more substanial ranking for that keyword.

Ok they know it's broke... now fix it. I am tired of waiting around for them.

While I am pleased that Google have acknowledged a problem, why can't they come out and say it on their own webpages - specifically in the sitemap help pages. Webmasters have known something was wrong for months now and despite all the conjecture and rumour, Google remained silent.

Question - how can a multi billion dollar company 'run out of server space'?

Question - when will this be put right?

My website has over 500,000 URLs, fully SEO'd, full sitemaps, submitted daily for 4 months now. How many indexed pages do we currently have? Approximately 250. Thats pathetic - but more than that, it is hurting my business. Some of my competitors have been left unaffected while we are suffering badly.

That said, thanks to the golden rules of web promotion, search engines are only a small part of our overall promotion strategy and we are still taking on 5 - 10 new members daily and are serving over 5 million pages monthly.

Think where we COULD have been though without Google dropping the ball.

For a better take on the state of Google have a look at this more recent post of Matt Cutts.

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » Indexing timeline

Basically

• too many reciprocal links from non related sources is bad
• too many outbound links is bad
• too many inbound links is bad
• links from bad neighbourhoods is bad
• too few links means that you dont get your pages indexed well
• Google can crawl your pages, but then not include them in the index if it does not consider them worthy
• Affiliate only pages, pages with duplicate content to other sites where say the text is the same across many sites - Google will probably choose to not index them even if it knows that they exist.
• ...

A very full post, and well worth a good read.

Basically, your linking strat can make or break your site. Soo easy to get it wrong, so easy to do an overkill.

As mentioned - Linking, absolutely essentual, yet real risky business.

My take on it all
- slowly and surely
- its not easy to get to the top of competitive phrases, and some ways you try may drop you places.
- single links from relevant websites will help - then comes the definition of what is a relevant page and relevant website.