Google’s Gary Illyes is in something of a difficult position over Google Penguin, as we await the latest update to the algorithm which will be Penguin 4.0 and the 7th Penguin update that’s expected sometime in early 2016. This update will see Penguin move from being triggered by the push of a button to becoming a real-time algo, a feature that will ensure the algorithm’s effects happen faster (e.g. promotion and demotion through the rankings).
When Penguin updates and refreshes as happened in the past, many SEOs witnessed drastic changes to their site rankings and were then forced to wait for a long period of time (anything from months to up to a year) for a subsequent Penguin update or refresh to reveal how remedial actions had affected their page rankings. Penguin 4.0 should allow SEOs to see their results faster, including being reinstated back into Google’s good books after cleaning up a tocxic back-link profile.
It’s interesting to note that the most recent Google update to Panda on 17th October 2014, was a slow rollout but the search engine giant have said that Penguin won’t follow this path.
In the meantime, engineers are apparently still working on the latest version of Penguin and Illyes said that he’s now given up trying to predict when it might go live because he doesn’t want to give out false information as, whenever he’s given out a date in the past, it’s been wrong! Unfortunately for Illyes, if a date’s announced and then missed, SEOs get quite frustrated too.
The element of the unknown in many of Google’s algorithm updates can cause stress to SEOs, who like to be able to plan to set aside a good chunk of time to analyse what’s taken place on their sites including on their competitor’s sites following an algorithm release. If an update’s suddenly announced and released the very same day, this can be problematic since SEOs have to drop everything at once to deal with it. When the long-awaited Penguin update does arrive, this frustrating situation should hopefully become a thing of the past.
