Confirmed: Google Penguin Update 3.0 (Data Refresh Update) 5 October, 2012

Google Penguin Update 3.0 which is also called ‘Data Refresh’ update again hits low quality websites. The Head of Google web spam Team ‘Matt Cutts’ confirmed this data refresh update using Twitter with a tweet-

Weather report: Penguin data refresh coming today. 0.3% of English queries noticeably affected. Details: goo.gl/AF5kt

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 5, 2012

This is the third Penguin Update affected by 5 October, 2012 which affects 0.3% English queries. The Google Penguin algorithm was launched firstly in 24, April 2012 which affected 3.1% queries and then next minor update was affected on 26, May 2012 who affects less than 0.1% queries.Take a brief look of these Algorithms update dates within the 6 months period-
Google Penguin Update 1.0 (First) – 24 April, 2012 (~3.1% queries affected)
Google Penguin Update 2.0 (Second) – 26 May, 2012 (~0.1% queries affected)
Google Penguin Update 3.0 (Third) – 05 Oct, 2012 (~0.3% queries affected)

What The Actual Motive of These Updates by Google-
The main objective of all such major or minor changes in Algo remains same i.e. to reward the high quality websites / content in Google’s search results by giving high ranking in SERP while to drop the ranking of low quality websites from Search results or completely removed from the search results. Low quality sites containing copied content, keyword stuffing, poor layout, many ads above the fold etc.
These updates are very beneficial for those websites or blogs who have original,unique and quality content but very low SERP (Search Engine Results Page) so now they can get a good ranking in Google search which results a good amount of traffic.
Anyway, In Case if you’re the victim of Google Penguin Update 3.0 (i.e. drop in traffic, drop in keyword rankings etc) then the recovery is still the same i.e. focus on quality content and get rid of low/poor quality content and don’t try to keep keyword stuffing to get rank higher in search results.
Pic credit- flicker

To learn more, you should refer the official Google webmaster central blog post here.
If you’ve any query or doubt about the same then please let us know via comments below-