I've noticed that many of the natural search listings that my site used to get have disappeared. The pages are still indexed, but don't get a reasonable placing anymore. A look at the webmaster stats shows that the click-throughs for any search other that the site's name have disappeared altogether.
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I don't think anyone's quite sure, but one idea is that the changes resulted in bigger brands coming to the forefront ("more trusted names" etc etc). Whether this relates to the products or the shop selling them (or both) I'm not sure. We have been making subtle changes to make sure brand names are more visible to Google, but so far it's difficult to see any definite changes. If you Google for something like "google brand chage" you might get more clues. You will see references to February 2009 which is when the changes occured in the US. The changes here were end June I think. -
Aye - the changes made are officially called the Vince change (after a Google employee) but have been quickly re-named as the Brand Update by us end users as the most visible changes to results are those affecting big brands. It appears that bigger brands with more 'trust' attched to them (in Google's opinion!) are ranking higher and the little people who put all the SEO work in to get where they were have been shafted. The results are still settling down so you may see a few of your terms return to page one, but the majority probably won't without some work. We've seen a few specific brands disappear for 2 weeks then pop back in, while others still haven't returned and we will work on them once the results have settled a bit more.
Google 'Google Vince Update' and 'Google Brand Update' for more info and Matt Cutts' official repsonse to some questions that were posed to him in February when it first hit the US...Comment
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