Google confirmed what we pretty much already knew, making perhaps its clearest statement on the matter yet. That last Penguin update it launched is going to continue indefinitely. It was originally billed as a slow roll-out, but now we know that it’s basically just not going to stop.

Is this a preferable approach to the algorithm as far as you’re concerned? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Search Engine Land is sharing the latest statement from Google on the matter, which goes like this:

That last big update is still rolling out — though really there won’t be a particularly distinct end-point to the activity, since Penguin is shifting to more continuous updates. The idea is to keep optimizing as we go now.

This explains why a lot of sites have seen fluctuations since the initial roll-out of the new Penguin. Some have seen their Google traffic come and go and bounce back again or vice versa. Such activity is likely to continue.

Much like the Panda update before it, the Penguin update should just be considered a fact of life now, as opposed to something that just happens every now and then. There’s pretty much no running away from it now.

Different from the Panda update, however, according to Barry Schwartz, who got the above statement from the company, Google isn’t necessarily getting new data continuously for Penguin, but is just kind of tweaking things as it goes along, making it different than “rolling update”. He writes at Search Engine Roundtable:

Now, many are interpreting this as the Penguin algorithm is now a rolling update that is happening by itself. I think that is not true.

What it seems to me is that we have engineers at Google that are finding things to tweak in the algorithm and are tweaking those things and pushing them out more quickly than we are use to.

I don’t guess that’s exactly confirmed, but either way, it sounds like we can expect to keep seeing activity around Penguin on an ongoing basis.

On the bright side, that also means that sites who are hit by the update should be able to recover in a fairly timely manner, rather than having to wait for an entire year for Google to push out another update. This is probably why Google said before the update launched that webmasters would find it a “delight”.

Given all the fluctuations, I have to wonder how many actually find it to be as such. Maybe they were just being sarcastic.

Some are concerned that Google has been messing around with the algorithm like this right in the dead of the holiday shopping season. This is something Google has basically tried to avoid for years after it kind of screwed some businesses over about a decade ago.

What do you think? Are you delighted by the new Penguin? Let us know in the comments.

Image via YouTube