In association with the updates on Google’s search algorithm, the announcement of its Page Layout filter refresh, which was discussed in January, is also referred to as the ‘Top Heavy’ update. With a brief glance over the last few updates, one can observe that the Panda Update 20 and the EMD Update 1 occurred over the 27th and 28th of September 2012 and the Penguin Update 3 and the Top Heavy 2 rolled out on the 5th and 9th of October 2012.

Described as a ‘minor’ update, it had a significant effect on 0.7% of the queries in English language. It is related to feedbacks from the users who respond that when they click on a search result, they find it difficult to search the actual content, and are dissatisfied with the overall experience. The users prefer to view the content immediately rather than scrolling through the various ads. Thus, the update can affect websites that do not have relevant “above the fold” content. If the click on a website reveals a significant part of the initial web page dedicated to ads, or lack of visible above the fold content, the website may not secure high ranks due to low browsing experience.

Although called as “Page Algorithm” update, it has been aptly described as “Top Heavy” as it targets web pages whose top portions are heavy with the ads. The second refresh associated, the Top Heavy 1 released on the 19th of January, 2012 affected less than 1 percent of the English query searches, while the Top Heavy 2, released on 9th of October 2012 had an impact on 0.7 percent of the same. As suggested by the update statistics, it can be observed that those who make changes recommended by Google are now free from the effects of the Top Heavy updates.

Various services have analyzed the impact of the Google updates like Top Heavy on various search results. One can view these graphs and illustrative charts to get a better idea about the impact of the Top Heavy update.

Google recently shared its updated list of 53 search quality changes that have extensively affected the search result on the search engine. The Google updates have left internet marketers and websites owners with surprise, when within the gap of eight days after the update of Google Panda 3.5, another update called Google Panda 3.6 occurred along with the new Penguin update.

Meanwhile, the Google has shared the news of releasing a new index tier, which according to make SEO experts, is big and tiered. Google has increased the size of base index collecting web pages and documents that can show search result by 15 percent. The base search index is the core index used for search results and query coming towards Google. The up-gradation of index has increased its ability to serve to the number of documents by 15 percent. Google keeps up index in tire in which documents are rated on the basis of the relevance and quality.

The Google announced several SEO rankings and updates in April month that are related to Google Panda and Google Penguin updates for maintaining standard of websites. These updates have improved how the keywords are scored in Google ranking. These updates will detect the websites that take help of keywords stuffing. Now, the internet users will able to see the more authoritative content and diverse set of domains after inserting keywords on Google search engine.

Google April updates have also brought several Google’s site links and mega site links changes. These are the links that display below the top rankings result of search on Google search engine. Sub site links will be shown on the search engine instead of the normal snippet. As per these changes, there will be least result for the site link depended on URL result used for general ranking, hence improving ranking of mega site link. From now, Google will regularly refresh site links through offline process to offer the most relevant links to the users.