As of mid-July, Google was sending the message that a new launch of its Penguin update was still months away. Now, over two months later, it’s getting closer. Just how close we don’t know exactly, but from he sound of it, it is likely to drop by the end of the year.

The topic came up in the latest Google Webmaster Central office hours hangout with Google Webmaster Trends analyst.

Mueller says if he had to guess, he’d say Penguin would launch before the end of the year, but obviously that’s not set in stone. Barry Schwartz transcribes:

I don’t feel comfortable making that far of a future decision. So I would guess but… it is really hard to say.
 
Sometimes we see things where we have all the internal information all lined up, we’re going to launch this in two or three days and everything is going to be awesome. And then something pops up and then we say we have to fix this problem first or there’s something with this data, and it gets delayed for a couple of days or maybe a couple of weeks. And these things always come up. And it’s something that I think it’s something that we need to make sure we respond to, and we don’t just roll out something that isn’t completely ready. So from that point of view, if it’s more than a month out, then, we can’t really say anything.

Meanwhile, webmasters who were penalized by the update (either legitimately or otherwise) have to wait to see if they can recover.

Image via Wikimedia Commons