What are google playing at?

Anyone know what the Crack is with google at the moment?

Changing all there layout in there sitemap pages (Which i think looks rubbish!) and there spiders are all over the place.

Since optimizing my sitemaps, I was getting over 20,000 googlebots to my page a day, yesterday it dropped to 3,000 for the whole day and today, 10 hours into the day, its at 8,000.

My index results dropped from 40K+ to 13,600 too???

Count yourself lucky - I am down from >100k indexed pages to 288 :(

Not a happy bunny with Google and not a squeak out of them to acknowledge there is any problem or that they are working on it. Instead their Blog site harps on about the new asthetic changes!

You know what Google are like, constantly updating and trying to innovate the process of searching and online interaction. I believe that Google is currently undergoing an update entitled BigDaddy. Although i am not too sure as to whether or not this update is still in effect.

I dug up a discussion on some similar changes that you have been experiencing from over on DigitalPoint which you may find interesting.

I personally havent experienced any drastic changes in the number of changes in my indexed pages, infact i actually enjoyed a slight rise in their numbers and a nice boost in my PR from 3 to 4 on my homepage and 3 to 5 on my forums homepage *boasts!*

'Big Daddy' is actually a google datacenter which most SEO's monitor frequently..... 'Big Daddy' is an alternative google index which you can think of as a beta one. Changes on the big daddy data center are a good indicator for what will roll out 'eventually' once stable, to the public datacenters.

Google <-- keep an eye on this