Google’s Next Penguin Update Within Weeks

Gary Illyes, the webmaster trend analyst from Google posted on twitter that the next update to the link spam algorithm known as Penguin will roll out within weeks. At the latest it will launch by the end of this quarter. Here is the tweet:

“@mrjamiedodd I’ll go with weeks. We’re aiming for launching penguin this quarter, but we don’t have a more precise timeframe.

— Gary Illyes (@methode) January 19, 2016”

Google, is generally reluctant to give any launch time frames for its link spam updates. It has however been more than a year since the Penguin 3.0 update. The Penguin 3.0 was really just a refresh and only affected 1% of US English search queries.

A refresh to the algorithm adds newly discovered spam signals. This causes demotions to the sites that survived the previous updates. A refresh will also restore sites that were previously slapped that have corrected any issues.

Before the last Penguin 3.0 update, the Penguin 2.1 update was in October 2013. This was a follow up to Penguin 2.0 which was infact a refresh with new signals added. That was also the last time that Google actually added any new signals to their algorithm. That does not mean that existing signals were not tweaked in the update.

We all wait with baited breath to see what sort of an effect the new Penguin will have. Will it be an update or a refresh? Will it be Penguin 3.1 or 4.0. We will know in a few weeks.