On the morning of September 6th, it was stated by John Muller that morning during a live webmaster hangout on YouTube around 5 minutes into the video that the update seen on Friday surrounding the SEO community is chattering about wasn’t related to the Penguin algorithm.
According to John, we are able to cross Penguin off the list for reasons why some SEOs and webmasters are noticing changes in the Google search results. Google is constantly doing updates to the search results, but John didn’t give any specific reason for the update, or even the name of the update.
Google was asked for an official statement on the update, but Google hasn’t responded yet as of this writing. All we know is that this update wasn’t related to Penguin. Here’s the video:
To learn more about the Friday update, see our post named Is a big Google search update happening? Chatter thinks so.