Clues About the Next Penguin Update

Clues About the Next Penguin Update from Gary Illyes

In the last four weeks, tweets from Gary Illyes of Google provided SEO practitioners and webmasters some clues about the next Penguin update.

Updating Real-time

Gary said via a tweet last November 24,2015 that the next Penguin update will be realtime and is going to be a “huge change”.

@forefront1 it will be an update to the algorithm. The new iteration will be realtime which is a huge change

— Gary Illyes (@methode) November 23, 2015

Its impact? Well, since Penguin will constantly be updating, those who will get impacted by the algorithm in the future should not have to wait so long to recover, theoretically.

Roll-out in 2015

Illyes also said in a tweet late in October that the roll-out of this update will be this year.

@Andrew_Isidoro yes — Gary Illyes (@methode) October 28, 2015

And we’re just left about a little above four weeks before the year ends so the update may be very imminent.

Google Penguin is a Google algorithm update, announced first on April 24, 2012. Its purpose is to decrease search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Past Penguin Updates

May 25,2012 – Penguin 1.1. The purpose of this update was to penalize websites using manipulative techniques to achieve high rankings.
January 2012 – Page Layout Algorithm Update or the Top Heavy Update. This targeted websites that had too many ads, or too little content above the fold.
October 5, 2012 – Penguin 3
May 22, 2013 – Penguin 4 or also known as Penguin 2.0
October 4,2013 – Penguin 5 or also known as Penguin 2.1
October 17, 2014 – Penguin 3.0. This was an algorithm refresh and no ranking signals were added in this update.

Something to Look Forward To

For those who have been penalized in previous Penguin updates, this is something to look forward to because this could be the chance to recover from the past iterations. So let’s wait for the next Penguin update and see what happens.