Eweek published an article yesterday about the negative effects of Google’s “Big Daddy” rollout. In the article, Larry Page is quoted as saying the issue has caught Google by surprise and they have a team investigating what happened.

I can speak from my own experience. I have a few sites which have dropped from 1000′s of pages indexed down to only a few. One site dropped to only having it’s index page listed. What’s interesting to me is that Google hasn’t come out before now to tell us their index is “broken”. Most of us in the SEO community have known something was broken with the Big Daddy rollout for awhile now.

Lack of Storage? Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has recently stated in an interview that Google faces a massive machine crisis, saying they are running out of storage. Not sure how a company with the resources of Google can have a machine shortage. Perhaps they were trying to purge some spam and duplicate content from their index in to free up much needed storage. Perhaps the pruning went too far, deleting quality pages and sites.