Rumored to start in early February, has already begun it seems. Has your PageRank changed?

Mine has.

On this blog, which previously had a PageRank of 3, the rank slightly increased to a still dismal 4. However, on my personal blog (which is not updated nearly enough), the PageRank took a nose dive….from 5 to 2.

The BigDaddy update is indeed a big deal. Rather than simply tweaking an algorithm, Google is instead switching to a new datacenter. They’re also tackling some long standing issues. Here’s a quick overview:

1. The Big Daddy Data Center- Google has many decentralized servers around the world. By having a decentralized system, Google is able to geographically personalize information for different global segments, and doing so makes the job of sending information much faster. These servers are the ones that spider the web and compare pages to what Google already has in the index.

The new data center has the code for ranking the web. Think of it this way: The decentralized global servers go and get the information and see if the information is already in the index. They then send the information to BigDaddy, which decides how to rank the info.

2. Canonicalization- Hard word, but easy term to understand. Let’s use this site for instance. If you type in http://lawfirmblogging.com, http://www.lawfirmblogging.com, or http://www.lawfirmblogging.com/index.php, you’ll get to the same place: the home page. But to Google, this is a problem, as Google sees this as three separate pages. Canonicalization can make a site like mine appear to be much bigger than it actually is. But an even bigger problem is how Google has thus far dealt with PageRank and Canonicalization.

For instance, let’s say Slashdot links to LawFirmBlogging.com (hey, it could happen!). Since Slashdot has a high PageRank, in theory it would boost this site’s PageRank. However, instead of linking to http://www.lawfirmblogging.com, they link to http://lawfirmblogging.com. In this case, Google would think that my non-www web address is more important than my www. address. So I could have separate PageRanks for the same page on the same site!

3. The 302 Redirect- A 302 Redirect is a method used by webmasters to hijack a page. Claus Schmidt has a good explanation (if you’re interested in the technical side of 302 redirects, check out his article):

1. Hijacker manages to get his script listed as the official URL for another webmaster’s page.

2. To Googlebot the script points to the other webmaster’s page from now on.

3. Searchers will see the right results in the SERPs, but the wrong URL will be on the hijacked listing.

4. Depending on number of successful hijacks (or some other measure of “severity” only known to Google) the search engine traffic to the other webmaster dries up and disappears, because all his pages (not just the hijacked one(s)) are now “contaminated” and no longer show up for relevant searches.

5. Optional: The hijacker can choose to redirect the traffic from SERPs to other places for any other visitor than Googlebot.

6. Offended webmaster can do nothing about this as long as the redirect script(s) points Googlebot to the page(s) of the offended webmaster (and Google has the script URL(s) indexed).

Claus Schmidt’s article does a great job of explaining how 302’s are used, why, and how you can protect your site from 302 redirects. His site also closely tracks what the search engines are doing to combat the 302 redirect problem. In BigDaddy, Google is trying to solve this issue.

Matt Cutts’ blog also gets into the nuts and bolts of how BigDaddy is trying to combat 302’s.

For a Q&A style article on BigDaddy, check out Feedback on BigDaddy Data Center, again on Matt Cutts’ blog.

So, the Google update is underway. I’d be curious to hear from other bloggers to know how the update has changed their blog’s status.

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