A couple weeks ago before I went to China I sent out an email to my clients stating that we were in the midst of a significant update by Google. Around the time I left (3rd week of Feb) this took place. Is was coined the “Brandy Update”.

Amongst changes that we are evaluating on of the apparent changes that colleagues have been able to identify is the greater influence of LSI or latent semantic indexing. This is something I have been talking about for around a year and can be found in the articles that I have published Top Tips for 2008 & 2009.

There were admittedly (by Google) 5 significant changes. We also believe that external linking has also been turned up, and is also, we believe, part of this “tweaking”, and also implements LSI technology. This means that Google is looking at the relation of your backlink anchor text as it relates to your landing page content, and the relativity of the content on the page linking to you. This is also something I mentioned as being significant.

Neither of these points are new information, but we knew they were coming.

There have been quite a few people that claim header tags have also lost quite a bit of influence.

We are diligently working towards identifying (accurately through testing and research rather than rhetoric which is everywhere right now) and will keep you updated.

Matt Cutts has made a video about it;

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