It’s looking like we’ll probably be seeing Google launch a new version of the Penguin update before too long, though Google still won’t give an exact timeframe. Either way, they’re working on it, and it’s coming.

Google webmaster trends analyst John Mueller, who regularly participates in Google hangout conversations with webmasters, hinted that an update is probably not too far off.

Here’s the video. He starts discussing it at 21 minutes and 40 seconds in:

“At the moment, we don’t have anything to announce,” he says. “I believe Panda is one that is a lot more regular now, so that’s probably happening fairly regularly. Penguin is one that I know the engineers are working on, so it’s been quite a while now, so I imagine it’s not going to be that far away, but it’s also not happening this morning…”

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, who pointed out Mueller’s comments, suggests Penguin 3 could be happening as early as today, saying, “All the tracking tools are going a bit nuts the whole week,” and pointing to some webmaster forum chatter and speculation.

Of course, such chatter and speculation runs rampant pretty much all the time, so I wouldn’t put a whole lot of stock into that particular aspect, but it does look like if it’s not coming immediately, it’s in the cards soon.

It has, after all, been over a year since Google pushed Penguin 2.0. Even 2.1 (or whatever you want to call it), which was bigger than the average refresh, was in October. There almost has to be one soon at this point.

Image via YouTube