So all the latest speculation about a Google seems to have been correct, and yet..

..not…

Aaron at SEO Book called it (first?) with another of his unique and extremely impressive posts and as always, enough research to make his point difficult to refute.

“The January 18th Google Update Was Bigger Than Florida, but Few People Noticed it

Well he’s right in our case because we’ve unfortunately been far too busy recently and neglected our usual algowatch duties somewhat, but do think this could be the final results of the apparent testing we documented quite thoroughly before Xmas, and the unusual SERP behaviour some have been seeing ever since.

On an open question session on video (below) and put up on Google’s youtube account Mr Cutts did confirm that there has indeed been an algo change, but that apparently..

“…inside of Google, at least within the search ranking team, we don’t really think about “brands” we think about words like trust, authority, reputation, pagerank, high quality..”

“Yes, Google has made a change in our rankings, it’s over one of 3 or 400 or so we make every year, I wouldn’t call this an update, I would call it just a simple change..”

“If you have to refer to it, one of the people who did a lot of work on it, his name was Vince, and so this particular change, we talk about it as being Vince’s change..”

But what it does look like now is that it is going to be ever and ever harder to make that all important first page in the big searches.