For the last couple of days the Search Marketing Expo East has been going on in the States, and it’s here that Gary IIIyes, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst and Search Quality Engineer announced that Google would be launching a Penguin algorithm refresh sometime next week. Unlike previous updates, this time it simply isn’t a refresh but a large re-write that took them the better part of the year to create.
1 Year on
Tomorrow will be the 1 year anniversary since Google’s Penguin was last updated, with the last one being the 4th October 2013. As many of us will know, this is the longest period between Penguin updates since its first release in April 2012. Webmaster all over the world have been crying out for the refresh, as it is the only way in which your site can fully recover if you were hit last time. Obviously you can make changes and over time your site would hopefully return to where it was, although a full recovery comes from the update.
This new update will make Webmaster’s lives “easier a bit” and for most people will make it a “delight”. These are pretty strong words coming from the Google camp, so hopefully many people will see an improvement in their rankings, IF you’ve put in the work.
Now that we know the update is upon us, there is no need to start flapping and start disavowing bad links. Google’s Gary has said that it is likely to be too last for this next Penguin refresh and this could be true from around 2 weeks ago.
Going forward
Now that they have a new algorithm in place, the penguin refreshes should be more frequent. So if you have missed this refresh, then don’t worry, according to Google another one will be coming along not long after.
As soon as we hear from Google on the release date and time, we will report this to you. If you are one of our customers, rest assured we will be monitoring your sites closely to see the impact. If you have any questions about Penguin or any of the Google updates, such as the Panda update, then please get in touch.