As you may know, Google’s latest Penguin update, which launched in October, is still rolling out. Google had said that it would be a slow rollout from the beginning, but here we are two months later, and it’s still going. They really weren’t kidding.
Some may take issue with the fact that Google is pushing such a major update during the holiday shopping season. If you get hit by a Google update this time of year, you risk losing major sales if you’re selling things online that people might want to purchase as gifts.
Either way, it’s continuing, and you probably shouldn’t count on Google to let you know when it’s done. Google’s John Mueller, whom you might as well consider the new Matt Cutts at this point, for all intents and purposes, conducted a Webmaster Hangout, as he often does. In it, he seemed to indicate that the update will continue, that Google might not publicly say when it stops, and that the goal is for it to continue updating. In other words, much like Panda before it, Penguin will probably just keep going on regularly.
“We’re hoping that these things will keep updating,” he said.
The good news with that scenario is that if you get hit by the update it should be a lot easier to recover. Before, you had to make the necessary changes to your site, and then sit patiently and wait for Google to launch another update. The last time, it took them a year to do so. The bad news, I guess, is that there is also a greater chance that you’ll be affected by the update.
Of course the primary goal of Penguin is to get rid of spam, so if you’re not doing spammy stuff, you should be safe from that part of the algorithm. That does assume that Google’s algorithm is actually doing its job correctly.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
