There was some update from google (yesterday or day before)as a result of which the ranking of most of my websites took a beating Anyone else noticed some change in their rankings or may be i got hit by some sort of penalty.
Actually the update was on December 17th. It looks like it was Penguin doing a pass around. Google officially denied any updates but Penguin isn't an algo update. Its a process. You may want to consider looking at your sites backlink profiles. Have you recently lost a lot of links to each of those sites, etc.
Yes, there was an update in PR. Don't worry about the loss, try to work more efficiently to get higher scores in next update.
Given that Google make ~500 updates/changes/tweaks to the ranking algorithm each yr, so of course there was an update yesterday; probably will be one today and another tomorrow!
this is true it was happens around 7 - 17th december, took some of my site pr goes down but some goes up, it's look like more update for quality backlink, one of my site only have 800 backlink and pr goes from 0 to 2, but the other sites have about 1000 to 2000 backlink but pr goes down from 3 to 1 and some back to 0
Yes update done on 17th December but it is happening till now. I found my few sites got ranked well but few sites got damage and now come in last pages of search.
It is not quantity of backlinks that matter but QUALITY. Make sure your backlinks are both relevant and have high PR. I have a couple sites with relevant high PR backlinks that are page 1 or #1 on Google.
I don't know about any update. Google has denied from any major update. You can read about it on search engine land.