Matt Cutts has released a Google weather report (an announced change to the index or algorithm of Google) – and the search engine community is all abuzz. Overall the changes are generally cosmetic (toolbar and backlink updates). Still, it is always interesting to hear what is up at Google.

Here is a quick summary of the report:

• The update is primarily a PageRank update and will also update data for link: and info: queries on Google.


• All of the changes were already incorporated in their page scoring, so the effects on the rankings should be minimal.


• There has been a change so that the site: operator will display regular results ahead of supplemental results. Matt also reminds people that supplemental results aren’t a bad thing and that the best way to get a page out of the supplemental results is by getting quality links to the supplemental page.


• The freshness of supplemental results should continue to improve, since Google will be indexing those pages more often.


• Google is pushing out data ever 1-2 days now, instead of every 3-4 weeks. This means we should see more variance in our rankings. I can attest that this is true, since I noticed that our rankings changes quite a bit on Sunday and Monday of this week.