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Matt Cutts, Google's chief search engineer, provided a long Q and A session on his blog Tuesday.

In it, he covers a few items of interest to the search marketing community, ranging from the Big Daddy update to a warning that a PR update is coming soon.

First of all, the Big Daddy software infrastructure upgrade is said to be complete as of last weekend. Every public Google datacenter is assumed to be operating in sync. The upgrade is now affecting search engine results seen by the majority of Google users.

The software upgrade will have an effect on PageRank values. Cutts noted that the PR as shown by Google Toolbar is likely to be updated soon and will see fewer fluctuations.

If you see the following user agent, Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) in your logs, Cutts confirmed that Big Daddy sent him.

Cutts noted that those selling links should "... mark them with a nofollow tag. Not doing so can affect your reputation in Google." He also confirmed that a datacenter located at http://64.233.185.104 is a testing ground for Google.

The most interesting thing found in his blog post touches on link-reputation and spidering depth. The better a site's link-reputation in Google's eyes, the deeper its spiders will travel. "In general, getting good quality links would probably help us know to crawl your site more deeply."

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Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel - 250-385-1190 Toll Free - 877-385-5526 Fax - 250-385-1198