Bourbon, the most recent - (and longest I believe) - update of Google started on Fri., May 20, and still isn’t quite done yet! Yesterday GoogleGuy posted the following at WebmasterWorld:

Here’s the advice that I’d give now: take a break from checking ranks for several more days. Bourbon includes something like 3.5 improvements in search quality, and I believe that only a couple are out so far. The 0.5 will go out in a day or so, and the last major change should roll out over the next week or so. Then there will still be some minor changes after that as well.

Since then he has been answering questions in another thread: Questions for GoogleGuy.

GoogleGuy’s patience at answering so many questions, especially from many who are new to SEO, is extremely impressive. Don’t think I would be able to do it.

So what has happened with this update? I don’t know, but some of the theories going around in the Bourbon update threads are nothing less than ridiculous! I don’t know how they come up with some of them. And unfortunately not many senior members have chimed in with a voice of reason yet.

Many people are speculating that all the Adsense scraper (and of course most of them spell it wrong!) sites that are linking to their sites is what is causing them to lose their rankings. That’s silly as hell. If anything, loss of those scraper site links - as they got thrown out of the index - is what is causing their problems.

But, I guess it is too early to draw any conclusions yet, according to GoogleGuy. So we will wait, and hopefully some more experienced SEO’s will share their thoughts about this update with the rest of the community.