Just a quick post as I wasn’t sure whether or not to mention my observations or not. For those of you who are unaware about what the “Vince Update” is – It’s one of the “many changes” Google made in their algorithm recently, which affected many websites as larger brands seemed to receive a boost in rankings.

I for one noticed this heavily in one of the industries I manage (travel related), every day one of 3 or 4 large brands would be shifted onto the homepage from the second or third page. This changed on a daily basis, giving these larger brands any position between 6 – 9.

Over the last week however it seems that this update has stopped dead. These brands are no longer being boosted to great positions for very highly searched phrases. I debated whether or not to mention this, part of me wants Google to have forgotten to switch the boost button on and the other part of me knows that updates in Google are as regular as minutes in the day.

Just my observations and would love to hear if any other SEO’s have seen the same?

February 2009 has been an important month for SEO’s around the world as some theories were put mainstream by Aaron Wall over at SEO Book. A recent debate had been brewing concerning brands getting more priority over less established sites in natural search? Well it seems that such an update has happened as this is something that I have been monitoring in the very competitive industry of “travel insurance”.

I work on SEO for a number of clients in the travel insurance industry and I started to notice strange listings appearing in the top 10 results. At first I assumed it was Google testing something out, I researched the competitors to see if they had received a sudden impact of link juice, which they hadn’t. What startled me was that some of these websites had very few links in comparison to the usual “top dogs” of the industry. Added to that the actual content on these pages was not great usually and the listings looked completely out of place an irrelevant.

What I did notice was that the sites were .gov or a brand I recognised through other marketing channels, i.e. TV, direct marketing etc. As it’s probably been a week since this update has occurred (I don’t care what Matt Cutts says, this IS AN UPDATE). The random brand websites making an appearance seems to change daily and only one or two websites actually change on the first page, however pages two and three are moving all over the place.

To give you an example of what I mean about this update, look at the screenshot below, displaying the top 10 UK results for Travel Insurance, I have highlighted the term travel insurance to show which listing doesn’t belong in the results.

Now I’m sure this will calm down a bit over the coming weeks but this makes ranking for the smaller brands and sites that much harder and the bigger boys seem to have it easy – More to follow.

Areas to keep an eye on that I will investigate:

• Brand anchor texts
• Brand mentions
• URL anchor texts
• Domain age
• Brand Universal Search

As any subscribers of my blog realise I am always keen to be on top of Page Rank updates, it’s an interest and benchmarking process more than anything. To my surprise I have discovered Google have updated their toolbar page rank as recently as early November 2009 and no-one has noticed.

So far in 2008 there have been 5 exports to the Google toolbar, far more than any previous years. Dates of the previous updates are below:

• 11/01/08
• 29/02/08
• 29/04/08
• 25/07/08
• 28/09/08

During these dates all pages within a domain would have each individual page updated with toolbar visible page rank. However I have seen pages, including my own which have been updated within the last week. This is also not an isolated incident – SEOMOZ also has pages updated.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/differential-diagnosis-a-broken-website-ranking-atop-google – this post was created on the 8th of November but is showing a PR 0, not a usual N/A.

See another example below:

However not all pages on every website seem to be experiencing this. I have many blogs and some posts which I consider to be more valuable still have no PR, even though they are older and have more backlinks.

So, what is this update? Throughout my own network of sites I have seen a slight trend and would really appreciate some other SEO’s and webmasters feedback and results on this.

1.    I have noticed Page Rank updates on blog posts that have no external links in the content
2.    I have noticed Page Rank updates on newer posts but less backlinks
3.    I have noticed Page Rank updates on “trusted sites” on posts only a week old with external links
4.    I have noticed Page rank updates on new blog posts for the past 3 weeks consecutively

Obviously we are all aware that Page Rank is something that Google wants to distance themselves from i.e. removing the mention in the toolbar download. However perhaps this is a new visible algorithm change for Google?

I would love to hear your thought’s people!