anand84 - 5:40 pm on May 8, 2010 (gmt 0)

Just posted the following in a related discussion on a friend's blog. I thought I might as well post it here as a means of encapsulation (and to underscore my understanding of the whole episode)

Massive sites with thousands of pages, years of authority and thousands of IBLs have lost out which is ideally not a good thing. Because they have lost out, sites which are still building their authority (but are nevertheless well optimized and possibly micro niche sites) have taken their place. As one forum member put it, this is probably a transition period where the new updates are being implemented which means the “trust factor” for authority sites have been temporarily turned off. So naturally the long tail pages lose their place to smaller micro-niche websites during this period since the latter is better optimized for the related keywords. So once the update is complete and trust factor is turned back on, these sites will (hopefully) get back to their original position.