For those of you that don’t know yet, Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal did a blog post on the Official Google Blog yesterday talking about their new update and how it helps “to reduce rankings for low-quality sites”.

So if you’ve seen a drop in traffic from the US, this is likely to be why. According to the blog post it is likely to affect 11.8% of all queries, so it is likely to have a big impact (positive or negative, depending on your type of site).

Content Farm Loses “McDonalds Coupons” Ranking
We’ve heard in a tweet from Center Networks that this change has hit Mahalo quite badly. Their number one ranking for “mcdonalds coupons” has dropped, this update hasn’t hit in the UK yet, so you can still see them there:

I checked out Searchmetrics – we often use the quick analysis tool for a quick sanity check, it’s great for checking out how updates have hit various sites and how the competition is performing.

You might notice from the screenshot that this is reported a week behind (as it takes a while to compile the data) – so over the next two week we should get a good view then on what has happened.

This one is JCpenney :

In the mean time, I’ll leave you with this video: ( ala http://www.seobook.com/i-am-long-mahalo style )