With the news of an impending Google Penguin update, SEO marketers and website owners are a little like a kid waiting for Santa on Christmas. Staring at page rankings and charts like a kid eyeing the milk and cookies, marketers are hoping they can be the first one to see the change go live. The anticipation is higher than ever since comments made at the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) East suggest the change may happen this week…maybe.
The buzz started when comments from Google’s Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst and Search Quality Engineer, got people excited about a possible next week launch date. A new update is always big news for internet marketers because it could undo their SEO efforts. But Illyes said this large-rewrite of the Google search algorithm would be a positive.
“The new Penguin update will make webmaster’s life “easier a bit” and for most people it will make it a ‘delight’,” wrote Barry Schwartz from Search Engine Land (the sister site of the SMX conference series), quoting the language Illyes used during the conference.
Google never gives exact date for SEO updates like these, and the company employees were quick to downplay any reports that the update would definitely be here this week. In commenting to Barry Schwartz’s original coverage, Illyes joked the specificness of the media reports.
“I love how you guys twist ‘soon’ into this,” commented Illyes. But he later added, “Hey, maybe next week.”
This prompted Schwartz to clarify on his personal blog.
“He [Illyes] did not say it WILL come next week,” Schwartz wrote. “He said that based on internal communication from two weeks ago, the decision maker on if and when the algorithm will be pushed live, said that it will be live in weeks. Since that was about two weeks ago, we asked if weeks meant a “few weeks” and if so, that would mean Penguin would be released in a week from now. He said, with a smile, it may be released next week.”
Though nothing will be known for certain until the new algorithm is released, a few of the expected changes can be extremely beneficial to website owners and internet marketers. One of the biggest expected changes is a reduced wait time for data refreshes. Website owners who received SEO penalties from the last update had to wait months from the time they fixed issues on their site before the saw their rankings improve again.
As was mentioned in a previous article on this site, comments from members of the Google development team strongly suggest that the wait time issue would be addressed. Comments from Gary Illyes at the recent SMX East event are more evidence of the improved refresh rate of the new algorithm. Illyes commented that website owners who disavowed troublesome links during the past two weeks wouldn’t see their changes reflected in the launch of the update, but he reminded the audience that the new algorithm would refresh more often.
The evidence seems to suggest that the new Penguin update will go live sometime this week or next. The only thing that could potentially delay the would be any last minute bugs that show up. So internet marketers who want to be on the cutting edge should keep watching the search rankings. Google-claus is coming to town.
For more information on the possible changes to be seen in the next Penguin update, check out this article on our site about Google’s recent attack on Personal Blog Networks.