Penguin Update Pushed Back Indefinitely

Despite having told you in January that the long awaited penguin update was due "soon," it now appears that it may not be rolling out in this quarter after all. The Penguin, or "webspam" update was originally rolled out nearly 4 years ago, and despite its importance, it has generated a lot of antipathy in the industry, due largely to the difficulty sites can face in recovering from it. This difficulty is a result of the infrequency of the updates, as it is only in updates that the results are reassessed to see if a penalty still applies. Last year Google announced that they would be working on a rolling version of the update, in order to alleviate the need to wait for manual updates to be run in order to recover.  However, despite early indications that its implementation was imminent, it looks like that has been indefinitely postponed.

Q1 Release Looks Dubious

Although they said last month that it was still scheduled for this quarter, and two notable sources (although not directly involved) have mentioned over Twitter that they do not know when it will update, with one of them saying "as soon as it's ready." At this point, there's no certainty about it, and web masters will just have to wait on Google's pleasure, as usual.