This is not directly related to the topic at hand, but since these two behaviours are Google-related and may be an effect of the update, I noticed them and felt it appropriate to share:
1) I recently created two articles for clients, both of which I published on my own website on Wednesday. While they were crawled on Thursday, they didn't show up in SERPs until Friday. They used to show up within 24 hours of my having published them on my site.
I'm not bitching about the extra 24 hours. What didn't make complete sense to me was the crawl taking place the day before the SERP listing, when it used to be on the same day. But again, it's not something I'm losing a great deal of sleep over.
2) I recently finished (other than
SEO, which I'm starting this weekend) a site for company called Award Kitchen Refacers.
About the time of the update, my client called me excited because he'd already gotten #1 ranking in the term "Kitchen Refacers". Having not so much as lifted a finger to start promoting his site before it was ready (he had 0 IBLs at this point), I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
Having looked a little further into it, I discovered the reason. I have two domains on my server with stopped sites belonging to former clients of mine (not stopped because of anything I did wrong with the sites, but for other confidential-type reasons.) Neither are redirecting to the new site and both have a "No website is configured at this address." message because they're stopped.
Google has indexed the Award Kitchen Refacers content under both of these domains and hasn't yet removed either from the index.
So...my thoughts are that it may not totally be a marketing error (although I do agree with Ken in that their customer service is rather lacking), but at least partly a technical error.