Google announced this update with little fan fare. Google said that it impacted roughly 1.2% of websites. However, we've seen big swings for nearly every website that signs up for Fruition's penalty checker.

The following questions appeared sometime ago when looking at Panda updates and are applicable to this update as well.

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
  

This Panda update was fairly significant but not reported by Google. Barry Schwartz, a well-respected SEO editor, blogged about it and noted a lot of chat on various SEO forums. This update primarily dinged sites with low quality, shallow or thin content. It boosted sites that continually publish lengthy, informative content from highly regarded authors. This is evidence that Authorship factors are growing in importance.

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Google reported less than 1% of searches were impacted by this update.

This update saw a lot of poor quality traffic going to sites that were impacted. This means that the quantity of traffic to your site may not have fluctuated, but the quality may have changed significantly, resulting in fewer conversions.

The Panda update also showed an increase in search visibility for well known brands. Lesser known sites seemed to suffer.

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This is a pre-holiday Panda update. Google reported that it impacted 1.1% of all U.S. search traffic. That is a fairly high number for Google updates.
There was a lot of chatter about blogs being impacted more on this than others. Some blogs that had a lot of guest posters seemed to have been impacted more than others.
This update also dinged sites that Google deems to be 'low value' meaning the site is not very useful, or publishes content available on other websites.
This update improved the search results of sites publishing:
-Original, well written content

This update went after page layouts. If your site had a big ads right in the middle of the page you probably saw a drop in traffic. If your site does not offer pleasing graphic design or does not use images to illustrate your text, you may have seen a drop.

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Google seemed to light the SEO world on fire with threats of a massive earth shattering update but this particular change did not impact many sites. The Penguin updates are designed to to reduce the amount of Web Spam. The penguin update hurt many sites that had lots of low quality inbound links. These include links from bad neighborhoods, spammy sites, links from sites with low Domain Authority scores, and sites that are off topic or irrelevant to your website' content.

Need help cleaning up bad links?
Need help cultivating new, high quality links?
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This was one of the big listed updates that took on the name of 65-pack because Google gave us 65 updates with bug numbers.
These updates tend to be focused on functionality and not so much on big Panda or Penguin type changes in results.

Highlights that may have impacted your site:
-Improve resutls for sites with high quality content from trusted sources
-Changes in the way Google generates autocompleted search queries
-Improved search for certain industries including Finance, Sports, Travel and Movies. Devalued sites featuring adult content.

This updated officially ended the party for easy-to-rank Exact Match Domains (EMD). For a long time, it was easy to buy a domain name that exactly matched a high volume search term and voila, there you were at the top of Google. For example, if a site wanted to rank for the term "Colorado Ski Resorts" then buying the domain name www.ColoradoSkiResorts.com did the trick, without much content or many high quality links. For years, it was a loophole that savvy site owners used. As of this update, game over.

The Panda #20 Update covered a variety of topics. In short, sites that did not conform to the overall best practices got dinged.

ONSITE Best Practices
-Current and compliant HTML coding and site architecture
-High quality, informative content
-Easy to navigate menus
-Avoid ad heavy pages (or at least no ads above the fold)
-No pirating of copy from other websites

OFFSITE Best Practices
-High quality inbound links from relevant sites
-Links from social media sites
-Overall trustworthiness of the site

VIOLATIONS:
-Thin content
-Keyword stuffing in content

DMCA Update
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-rewar...

This update goes after sites that are scraping content and perhaps spinning it. This is a violation of Google' Quality Guidelines
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3

Lots of Panda and algorithm updates and changing the way sites appear. It's interesting that Google listed the bug numbers with this update list.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/08/search-quality-highlights-86-ch...

uefa-euro1. [project codename “Answers”] Addition of a live result showing schedule and scores of the EURO 2012 games (European championship of national soccer teams).
#82293. [project codename “Answers”] Improved dictionary search feature by adding support for more natural language searches.

Would you trust the information presented in this article?
Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?

http://searchengineland.com/insanity-google-sends-new-link-warnings-then...

Panda update with fairly wide spread impact.

May always seems to be a big month for Google updates. Perhaps Google engineers set may as a the end of a four month sprint then take the summer off?

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/06/search-quality-highlights-39-ch...

Here’s the list for May:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-thing...

Another update with a nice but generic listed changes.
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/05/search-quality-highlights-53-ch...

Google's knock down of webspam
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-qua...

Listed March updates http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-qua...

Updated likely on freshness of content. Not much else is known about this one.

Updated data within Google's index.

Also, turned off a link signal which no really seemed to figure out what they meant.

Local Search Rankings were impacted utilizing core organic search results more than local results.

Improved site links and better detection of official pages e.g. band websites.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-i...

We had an adsense site get hit by this update. We left it up as an example denverolympics.com. The site had a lot of other issues but it ranked well for exact match. The day after this update the site dropped.

G+ enters the organic search world forever changing generic who gets served what results.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/12/search-quality-highlights-new-m...

More comprehensive indexing: This change makes more long-tail documents available in our index, so they are more likely to rank for relevant queries.

New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites with little unique content for our users and are often filled only with ads. In most cases, we prefer not to show them.