Google Says Penguin Refresh Months Away From Happening

Google's Gary Illyes reminds us that the Penguin algorithm refresh is still months and months away, as Google works to make Penguin run in real-time.

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Gary Illyes from Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst team said over the weekend on Twitter that the Google Penguin refresh won’t be happening for some time.

Gary Illyes said the Penguin update/refresh is “months away.”

This is not completely shocking, being that at SMX Advanced Gary told us that Penguin currently runs slowly but they are working on making it run faster. Back then, Illyes said this this kind of change is months away and that is what Google has been working towards.

Google is working towards making Penguin run in real-time, with continuously fresh link data and an algorithm that runs in real time.

But again, to get there, Gary Illyes from Google said, would take months and he just reiterated that in Twitter this weekend.

Here are dates of all Penguin releases:

  • Penguin 1.0 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
  • Penguin 1.1 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
  • Penguin 1.2 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
  • Penguin 2.0 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
  • Penguin 2.1 on Oct. 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)
  • Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014 (impacting around 1% of queries)

Will it be another year until we see a Penguin refresh? It is totally feasible at this rate.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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