What is interesting about this update is that it is giving less of a priority to reference/ informational sites and is being more democratic about backlinks not to focussed on the trustrank of the baclinks or the site.

Could this have been a result of some of the persistent complaints made on their Engineers blog about the overemphasis on certain informational sites in SERPs.

For example: Look at the Top 20 results for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: (a very SEO'ed term)

google.com/search?as_q=search+ ...

Even Google's Webmaster Guidelines which stayed at #2 for months has fallen to #12 – as well as another very white hat SEO who fell from page one after three years.

Several SEOs who do engage very aggressively in link exchanges have actually risen a few spots after months of staying at the bottom of page one.

There are also several changes in the SERPs for the term HOME – which is a good way to measure how effective INTERNAL BACKLINKS are on the SERPs

google.com/search?as_q=home&am ...

rankpulse.com/home?p0=on&p ...

In his latest blog post there are answers given about the importance of the Human influence in Google's SERPs – and a discussion with Google's VP of Engineering

mattcutts.com/blog/udi-manber- ...