Domain Age
Google has emphasized on age of the domain in this update. The age of the domain can be considered as a factor to determine the genuineness and reliability of the company or the website. This will definitely affect some newly introduced informative and innovative sites which may get spanked like what happened during the last update.
Backlinks
Evaluation of backlinks have also witnessed adjustments. It appears the number of links are more imperative than the relevancy of links. Websites with large, irrelevant reciprocal link directories are outranking sites with fewer but more focused link. Non-reciprocal linking will loose the benefit over the reciprocal linking in the latest update.In the current scenario, developing a reasonable sized website with a large reciprocal link directory relevant or irrelevant should be sufficient to fetch high rankings, although this method should not stand on.
PageRank
You will see a major alteration in the PageRank, because there might not be any PageRank now onwards. PageRank will be replaced with TrustRank, but you will not see a green bar displaying the TrustRank.
Conclusion
Domain age, back links, and page rank are the significant areas where adjustments are made that has led to sudden changes in the rankings, but you may again observe a shift back to last week's results over the weekend or may be before. After this, algorithms will be modified to resolve the issues that have been experienced during the launch of recent update. Do not get excited if your site has jumped from page rank 4 to 2, also don't panic if your site has seen a sudden downfall because actual implementation is still awaited. More adjustments to this algorithm are necessary and, if you've used solid SEO practices and been consistent and varied in your link building tactics keep at it and your rankings will return.