If you've been promoting your site on the Google search engine, you've probably experienced ups and downs at times unless you are a strong authority site whereby these updates don't have practically any effect on your rankings such that the latter are rather stable. These ups and downs are what the seo marketers call the Google updates. These updates are important because Google is tweaking its algorithm to deliver better search engine results and hopefully to solve problems which are being faced by marketers ie url canonicalization, duplicate content and 302 redirects. In the past months and years, there have been several updates eg Florida, Allegra, Bourbon, Jagger and the latest one at the time of this writing(03/01/2006) is Bigdaddy which has already started about 2-3 months back. These updates are named at webmasterworld.com. You can read more about this latest update on Senior Google engineer Matt Cutts blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddyGoogle.

Google has several datacenters and when the updates are rolling in, the different datacenters are working on building new results and when everything is stabilised and settled, the final results are shown on the main Google.com. Google is no longer proned to chaotic updates whereby the search engine results are really shaken with rankings shifting quite a lot and creating confusion. With all the different datacenters, Google is proceeding with micro updates. Presently, Bigdaddy is only live at 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104 right now. You might want to take a closer look at 66.249.93.104 as Matt Cutts says this is the preferred data center to hit.

If you have a website ranking in the search engines and according to the datacenters, you seem to be affected, don't panic. It's of no use constantly worrying about whether your site will finally come out "safe and sound" when the update is not over yet. And if you have a good site with several quality backlinks from different sources ie reciprocal links, one-way links, directory links, article links and press releases links, you should not really worry. Even you lose rankings, it might just be temporary and will get fixed sooner or later. In the meantime, continue to work in building your backlinks and content as well and not wasting too much time checking and monitoring the update. Let it do its job and you might be surprised by the final outcome.