brianp - 4:09 pm on Oct 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

I'd say an update is definitely in process--

1) I've noticed a site in our industry that was heavily punished by penguin has started a new site, with a link from the old site (not a 301, a traditional link with anchor text being exact match for keyword phrase) that is now ranked #3 where the punished site was. The only links to this site are from the penguin punished site and a link exchange site.

2) Massive spike in Googlebot crawling activity on our main US ECommerce site. It was like this through all of September, and slacked off in October until yesterday, see image:

[i46.tinypic.com ]

Every time this sort of thing pops up, its not long afterwards that Google is announcing (or not announcing but actually doing) an update.