The ongoing WebmasterWorld thread that tracks Google activity has webmasters and SEOs asking if there are algorithmic updates going on, either Panda or Penguin. I can say, Google has not told us about any update but there has been a heck of a lot of penalties, manual actions and widespread targets on the manual side that happened over the past couple weeks.
For example, this week, we had a blog network penalized impacting many of the publishers associated with that network. Last week, Google took action on link networks in Spain, Germany and Italy. Earlier, Google also target networks in Poland and France.
Google has clearly stepped up their activity in a very manual way, targeting networks that use links to manipulate Google's rankings. This is both on a large scale, going after larger networks, as well as the daily smaller scale manual actions.
So while there may have been a Panda refresh, since they are kind of pushed out monthly. But if Google pushed out that softer Panda update, Google would have likely told us.
I may be wrong, but most the tracking tools seems pretty flat, with the exception of one.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
