For a significant part of last year, we heard that Google’s next Penguin update would likely happen before the end of the year. That didn’t happen. Last month, Google finally admitted it wasn’t going to.

At the time, it sounded like it wasn’t quite ready yet, but was very close. It also sounded like it would likely happen THIS month. Google’s John Mueller said he was confident it would come in January. Here’s what he said (as transcribed by Search Engine Roundtable):

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.

We’re now eight days into the month, and so far, there’s no sign. Google’s Gary Illyes, who often responds to webmaster questions, including those about Penguin (even though he’s not on the actual team that works on it), said he hasn’t seen any experiment results from the upcoming update yet:

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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