Google Algorithm Update On August 28th?

I am seeing some significant signs of a Google update in the WebmasterWorld forums. There is a large uptick in SEOs and webmasters talking about changing in the search rankings for their keywords.

Some are citing huge drops in referrers and rankings from Google, while others are saying they saw an 20% uptick in traffic from Google as of yesterday.

The first real post on this came in about 24 hours ago from a webmaster who said:

Small drop today for keywords with 'firm' in the combination.

HUGE drop (a lot going outside the top 100) for keywords with 'firms' in the combination.

We just had a Panda update so I doubt it is Panda related. I know we are waiting on aPenguin update. But this can be an update to Penguin, Panda or an other algorithm. It can be manual penalties, it can be a bug, it can be nothing.

I'll ping Google and update this post when I hear back.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

An update on Google Algorithm

Google aim to provide a great experience for our users and have developed over 200 signals to ensure our search algorithms deliver the best possible results. Starting next week, Google will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices Google receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed fromSpotify.

Since Google re-booted our copyright removals over two years ago, Google have been given much more data by copyright owners about infringing content online. In fact, Now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009—more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone. Google will now be using this data as a signal in our search rankings. 

Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law. So while this new signal will influence the ranking of some search results, Google won’t be removing any pages from search results unless Google receive a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner. And Google’ll continue to provide "counter-notice" tools so that those who believe their content has been wrongly removed can get it reinstated. We’ll also continue to betransparent about copyright removals.