In today’s Google Webmaster Hangout, the inevitable question came up about the fluctuations people have been seeing in the search results.  John was asked specifically if there was a Panda or Penguin update.

We didn’t update anything that I’m aware of.  I saw Barry’s blog post about some changes he was seeing on the weekend.  But that’s not related to panda or penguin, we essentially make updates all the time, so these are changes as normal.

He was questioned further, as someone said the changes were pretty huge to just be a small algo change.

I guess it depends on how you look at that, what you measure that and what your tools are measuring.  That’s really hard for me to say what you are seeing there.

So it wasn’t Panda and it wasn’t Penguin.  But it does seem as though something changed, but likely one of their regular 500+ changes to the algo they make every year… this one just happened to hit a vocal subset of SEOs and webmasters it would seem 🙂