Well this has been an interesting weekend.. Google has done a massive update to the algo used to rank websites. Many many many websites have went from page 1 to page 500 in a matter of seconds. And other websites have remained unchanged. This is the nature of the SERPS. Now we learn, research, and figure out what the new factors are and adjust.

I have compiled some comments below from some of the sources I monitor for intelligence.

This is exactly what google needed to accomplish. And it’s so far exactly what I’m seeing, sites that have heavy seo work done on them, or towards them, have dropped, while sites that don’t, are either exactly the same, or ranking slightly better than before on the new results. Thus steveb’s claim that this is not an update. But who cares what you call it, this is clearly catching the intended targets, seos.

This may actually have some truth to it. Google as been rumored in the past to try and negate the function of SEOs. There is some evidence that “over-optimized” websites were indeed targetted in this update.

This also reminds me of Florida, and it’s why I have not been using any of the more aggressive seo tactics on the sites I have full control over, I expected this type of clamp down, especially after this summer’s filter tests and modifications, and especially after the apparently manual removal of directories a while ago. It is my working assumption that manual removal was carried out to enable google to construct a profile of spam backlink directory farms, at least that was part of the purpose.

I think maybe what has happened is that google is testing a completely new version of hilltop, with a completely redone trustrank component, which is why some people see little or no changes, while others see very large changes.

Again this author here suggests that seo’s may have been the intended target of this update. If this is the case, it illustrates further why a natural approach to seo is favored over a more aggressive, amatuer 1 sided approach. This is something obuweb has been doing for some time, taking a more wholistic approach to seo.

But other commercial sites did not drop, those also have seo done on them, but of I believe a different type than the ones that did drop, I haven’t studied them enough to determine what the difference was or is, but I could guess.

This is the magic answer that will come to light in time as further analysis is done.

At this time the infamous “Miserable failure” search text still works.
It can’t just be the anchor text that has been tweaked in the latest update.

The author is referring to an old google bomb in which the term “miserable failure” shows a site for GW Bush ranked number 1. This makes sense, and is in line with our theory that mainly just “recip IBLs” have been de-valued, and not ALL links..

More coming soon.. this post is open for comments.