According to a Tweet from Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, Gary Illyes, earlier this month, the long awaited and much expected update to the Google Penguin algorithm is expected to roll out within “weeks.” Or at the very latest, by the end of this quarter.
Penguin, for those of you who have trouble keeping track, is the “link spam” algorithm that was designed to identify sites which had unnatural link profiles (as a result of purchased or manufactured links) and downgrade their ranking in the search engine results.
The last time the Penguin algorithm was updated was more than a year ago, and even that was considered a minor update, reported to affect less than 1% of English search queries.
The Long Wait
The main problem that webmasters experienced with these updates was that if you got “hit” by one of the updates, and rushed to clean up your link profile etc. you still had to wait for them to update it again, before you could find out if you would recover or not.
Apparently though, this latest update will change all that. Allegedly (although as yet unconfirmed), the upcoming update will incorporate a rolling refresh, so changes made to bring sites into line with the relevant guidelines should take effect relatively quickly, rather than having to wait an unknown period of time for the next update.
Coming Soon
We don’t know exactly when it’s going to arrive, but we do know it will be soon. We don’t know exactly what it’s going to affect, but we hope it’s going to be the start of a continuous process, not the “stop and go” type of updates we’ve had so far.
Right now, nobody knows for sure. But we’ll tell you right here once we do.
