Yesterday, Matt Cutts of Google announced on Twitter that Google has officially updated the page layout algorithm that it launched in January of this year.
This is the first official and confirmed update of this algorithm but I do not believe this is the first time they actually ran an update on this algorithm. I believe they ran updates and refreshes to the page layout algorithm before but haven't told us. Google has been in a telling mood and told us about this data refresh.
Why do I think this wasn't the first update? Well, when I ran a poll in June about recoveries for this update, 21% said they did recover - and the only way for them to recover is for Google to push out a refresh OR if they webmaster confused this update with another.
Here is Matt's tweet:
Minor weather report: Update of goo.gl/OpIDL launching today. ~0.7% of English queries noticeably affected.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 9, 2012
Now, the biggest complaint I am seeing is that the updates are happening so fast and on top of each other. Honestly, I think this is typically the case, but recently Google has been very interested in announcing these updates.
Let's take a look:
As you can see, there is a lot going on recently with updates at Google.
I personally would not label this page layout update a second update, I wouldn't be surprised if this was number 3 or 4 or so for the year.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.
