In the Google Webmaster Central office hours hangout on Google+ on September 12, Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller says Penguin 3.0 will likely launch in 2014.
“My guess is yes,” Mueller says. “But, as always, there are always things that can happen in between. I’m pretty confident we’ll have something in the reasonable future, but not today, so we’ll definitely let you know when things are happening.”
This news comes after Mueller said in a September 8 hangout that Google is working on a Penguin update and “so I think that saying there’s no refresh coming would be false.”
However, Mueller did not offer a specific timeframe for the update, other than it was “not happening today,” noting he doesn’t like to give out timelines because things are still subject to change.
“I know the team is working on this and trying to find a solution that generally refreshes a little bit faster,” Mueller added.
Baruch Labunski, CEO of SEO and digital marketing agency Rank Secure, then asked Mueller to clarify whether his comment about making things faster meant updates would happen on a regular basis like Panda.
In response, Mueller said:
We’ll see what we can do there. That’s something where we’re trying to kind of speed things up because we see that this is a bit of a problem when webmasters want to fix their problems, they actually go and fix these issues but our algorithms don’t reflect that in a reasonable time, so that’s something where it makes sense to try to improve the speed of our algorithms overall.
One day later, Mueller wrote in the Webmaster Central Help Forum that it’s possible for webmasters to change their sites to improve rankings without a Penguin update if they focus on cleaning up site issues and making sure the sites are as good as they can be in and of themselves rather than focusing on individual factors of individual algorithms.