The Big Daddy update actually involved changes to Google's infrastructure, which have been rolled out little by little over the past few months. According to Google's Matt Cutts, many of the changes may not even be noticeable by the average user. However, if you manage a web site, you may have noticed fluctuations in your rankings in recent months.

Here are a few notable features of the Big Daddy update:

• If a web site had two versions of its domain name listed, one containing a "www" and the other not (i.e. www.webposition.com and webposition.com), then Google would traditionally treat them as separate web sites. This had the undesirable effect of diluting the link popularity resulting from your inbound links. The Big Daddy update has addressed this issue, and Google will now recognize the two versions of the domain as the same web site.

• Google has employed a new version of their search engine spider, a new User-Agent, which is "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
  

For more information and comments about the update, read this Q & A thread posted on March 27th in Matt Cutt's blog.

If you find that your web site's Google rankings have been adversely affected by the Big Daddy update, the first thing to do is to review the site's search engine optimization. An excellent tool to help with the optimization process is WebPosition's Page Critic. It's also a good idea to make sure the site does not have any duplicate content issues, or other violations of the search engines' terms of service.

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