We heard for months that Google’s next Penguin update was likely to happen before the end of the year, but last week, the company finally admitted that this was not going to happen.

The indication was that they were waiting for the holidays to be over, but it was unclear if that was the only factor. In other words, we don’t really know if it’s actually ready to go and they’re just waiting, or if it’s still not quite ready.

From the sound of it, it’s still not QUITE ready, but is very close, and the latest word from Google is that it will probably come in January. Still no guarantee though.

Search Engine Roundtable points us to a Google Webmaster Hangout in which Google trends analyst John Mueller says he’ confident it will happen next month. Here’s the quote (as transcribed by the site):

Um, I don’t want to make any date promises but I am hopeful that things are lined up. Since it was kind of on the edge for this year, I’m pretty confident that that’s good enough for January. But I really don’t want to make any announcements on that.

As you probably know by now, this Penguin update is supposed to go real-time, so it will continuously update without webmasters having to wait forever for a refresh if they happen to be impacted by it and need to make changes to their site to recover visibility in search results.

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