“We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index, but expect the update will be completed soon.”

As mentioned earlier, the update was first felt by many webmasters as early as August 1st, with the following posted on Webmaster World,

“I do not know if this is limited to Italy, but I see different results today. Sites having the keyword in the urls are gaining positions. Internal anchor text links have more weight than ever… “

In discussions around the web, other website owners shared the sentiment that keywords in the URL seem to be playing a greater impact on ranking. Many other webmasters have also complained of a drop in traffic, but it is still early stages and the results still may not have settled.

The update has come as a surprise to many, with the last Yahoo update only on July 17th. It also comes straight after a recent Google Update which saw many websites gain PageRank and recover from older penalties.

If your site has been impacted by either update, share your stories with other website owners below!