The Google ‘Vince update’ was recently released to UK users, and although Matt Cutts mentioned it was a minor update, further investigation has resulted in the following discoveries.
Early signs suggest that ‘Big Brand’ Sites are now more favoured than smaller sites, although Cutts was quick to dispel this stating that Vince does not necessarily push brands to the top of search results, but is more focused on factoring trust into the algorithm for more generic queries.
As a result of the Vince update, there has been an increased penetration of US sites (and sites from other English speaking countries) featuring more heavily in UK SERP listings. It remains to be seen whether this will benefit UK search terms on Google and will be beneficial to the user.
Also, Wikipedia is dominating the results more than ever which can be irritating for many users as most of the time a Wikipedia page will not be desired.
On the plus side, deep-links now hold more authority than in previous updates which have linking benefits for many websites’ internal pages.
As a case study, Travel Insurance results have had a major shake-up: ‘Post office’ has risen from 12th to 2nd, while Tesco has shot up from 20th to 6th place for search term ‘Travel Insurance’.
One could compare this latest update to the difference between walking through a car boot-sale and walking down the high-street although both now result in empty shops and stalls.
We’ll just have to wait and see how permanent these recent results are and whether Google will U-Turn like they did with the ‘nofollow’ rules.
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