I have a different theory on the 3.0 Penguin update

.... It never happened.

 

How come? I noticed improvements on our sites search ranking.

 

It seems like most webmasters can't see any serious fluctuations:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-confirms-penguin-3-0-update-heres-reaction-far/118404/

Though it was officially announced that it indeed was rolled out, the impact seems to be strangely insignificant.

Some webmasters too question if this thing was really another update or something else. There's some sort of vagueness about this particular update. Nobody knows for sure if it's still rolling out, done rolling out or will continue to roll out for the next few days.

I think this will be an interesting month. We shall see.

 

LOL ......

I have rather different opinion. My niche is badly hurt. All my competitors lost their rankings and I cannot see them anywhere in serps Though I am hit too
If you ask me, I'd say something really happened to Google recently - something bad.

 

"Recently" as of the last Saturday till today? Do you have any stats to show? How bad is it?

I am not saying this can't be the case, but when I go online to find out more about this subject nobody seems to see any serious changes. But maybe it's just starting to hit people. Don't know. I thought this whole thing was some sort of a spoof.

 

Weekly GA view of my blog.

 

A major decline in impressions.

 

Yeah, looks terrible. But... it may spring back up.

 

I believe it indeed started rolling out but not yet completed. This was actually hinted a few times from a couple of Google reps and on late Friday-early Saturday actually quite a lot of people in the marketing forums started seeing changes. Keep in mind that its fully possible not to hear a great fuss about it, as about 1% of global English search queries were affected (last Penguin algo updates always encompassed no more than 3-4%). So if you are following good SEO practices you might not see any changes at all, the changes will be for those who still employ paid links, link farms etc. as a link-building method.

Quite a large group of people were expecting this update for a loooong, loooong time tho - the people that were hit by the previous Penguin because they didn't know better, fixed their sites and were awaiting the update so it can reclaim its rankings. Not only that, bbut according to people in Google, Penguin updates should be much more frequent from now on, so people wouldn't have to wait an year and more just to get their positions back. So its really more good news than bad imho

 

Maybe we are just used to or we are expecting more from the update like what we received from the previous updates.

 

Mine didn't hit that bad. There are some ranks that went down 7 steps back but I managed to put them back on track. So your theory probably is correct.