Every few months Google updates the algorithm it uses to rank websites in its index. Some of these updates are more significant than others, but because of Googles market leading position these updates can be extremely significant to many online businesses.
Internet Marketers assign names to these updates much the same way the weather service names hurricanes. Last October it was Jagger, before that we had the infamous Florida Update in late 2003, and Austin in early 2004.
Each update is designed to improve search results by either doing a better job of identifying high-quality content on the Internet, or by doing a better job of suppressing low-quality content.
Over the last two or three weeks, many website owners have seen traffic to their sites from Google fluctuate quite a bit. This is normal for algorithm updates as the index is updated on one data center, a site will change positions. The fluctuations occur because the index in the new data center is not completely built, and therefore a site may be placed artificially high or low until all the data is brought into equilibrium.
A few days ago, Google completed a major overhaul of its...