On Thanksgiving weekend, I reported a lot of buzz and chatter around a possible Thanksgiving day Penguin refresh from Google.
This morning, Google has confirmed that what SEOs and webmasters noticed was indeed Penguin related but as a result of the "ongoing" Penguin rollout. Yes, Penguin 3.0 rollout that started in October is still not complete.
Google told us on record:
The Penguin rollout is ongoing, and this is just the effect of that.
In short, Penguin 3.0 is rolling out still, even 6 weeks later. This rollout had a major shock wave on Thanksgiving day for some reason. But that shockwave seemed to be mostly reversals of sites that got hit initially by 3.0, which is why I named it Penguin 3.1.
In any event, I guess this is still Penguin 3.0 but still rolling out.
Forum discussion continued at Black Hat World, WebmasterWorld and Twitter.