Big Daddy still hurting your rankings?

If you are still not seeing an improvement after the Big Daddy release try this simple change. If you have truly fixed everything that you are supposed to, you rankings will return and stay. If you have not, this experiment will only give you a temporary reprisal.

Before trying this, make sure you are not doing anything stupid on your site. Additionally this only works if your site uses a simple directory structure.

For example…

http://www.mysite.com/category-name/widget.html

Change this to

http://www.mysite.com/new-category-name/widget.html


A colleague of mine discovered that this method will reset all filters on a particular directory structure. However, if you are doing something that will raise the flag again you will suffer the filter returning.

This logic is simple and makes perfect sense. Search engines store pages by their URL within their databases. If you significantly change the location, it looks like you have created a new page. You cannot point any links to the old pages, otherwise this will not work. Additionally do not 301 your old pages over.

Try it out; I have done this on 4 sites. All of them returned back to normal, the one site that I know is not clean dropped right back out of the index as I suspected.