Big Daddy update (2005): what changed and what it means now

What Google changed#

Big Daddy was a change to Google’s infrastructure rather than its ranking formulas. In his 4 January 2006 post, Matt Cutts wrote that “this is neither an update nor a data refresh; this is new infrastructure.” In a later indexing timeline he called it “a software upgrade of our crawling and parts of our indexing.”

Cutts said it laid the groundwork for better canonicalization, and in March 2006 listed smarter redirect handling as another improvement it would enable. He also said it brought smarter Googlebot crawling, including full gzip support and a crawl caching proxy.

Google named it itself. Cutts explained that a webmaster called JeffM suggested “Bigdaddy” during a Pubcon session, and Cutts used it because the change fell outside WebmasterWorld’s usual update naming.

When it rolled out#

Search Engine Roundtable reported a test data center with a new index on 14 December 2005, the same address Cutts later named as a Bigdaddy data center. Cutts said the crawl and index team were ready to debut it in December but gave no day, so the start date here is approximate. He opened it for feedback on 4 January 2006. By 29 March 2006, he wrote, Big Daddy “was fully deployed and the old system was turned off.”

What is known about its impact#

Google published no impact figures. Cutts described the ranking changes as relatively subtle and said most changes were under the hood. In his timeline he said the main complaint was that some sites saw few pages indexed. He attributed that to low trust in a site’s links, such as excessive reciprocal links or link buying and selling, and said Google tuned thresholds to crawl more pages from those sites.

What site owners should do#

Big Daddy itself is history, but canonicalization, which it prepared the ground for, is still how Google handles duplicate URLs. Google’s current guidance describes it as choosing the representative URL from a set of duplicate pages.

• Choose one preferred URL for each page and point redirects and rel=“canonical” at it.
• Keep internal links, sitemaps and redirects consistent with that preferred URL.
• Avoid link schemes that, as Cutts described, can lower trust in a site’s links.

How to check whether it affected you#

This is a historical question. Search Console keeps 16 months of data and did not exist in 2006, so the only evidence would be server logs or analytics archives from December 2005 to March 2006. For anything recent, the Google Algorithm Updates timeline lists every update with its dates, so you can check what rolled out when.

Related updates#

• The Jagger update was the ranking update just before it, in late 2005.
• The Bourbon update drew earlier reports of canonical URL problems, in 2005.
• The Caffeine indexing system was Google’s next major indexing rebuild, in 2010.