Next Generation Of The Penguin Update “Few Weeks” Away

In March, Google’s chief web spam fighter Matt Cutts promised that the Penguin Update 

designed to fight spam would get a big refresh later this year. Today, Cutts gave an update — keep waiting. It’s still a few weeks off. Along the way, there’s some confusion about whether the next Penguin Update will be Penguin 2 or Penguin 4. It’ll be Penguin 4, in how we reckon things. Let’s dive in.

Note that Cutts refers “Penguin 2.0″ as the coming rollout. How can that be, when we’ve had three confirmed Penguin updates already, with Penguin 3 happening in October?

This all goes back to a different update, the Panda Update, which first launched in February 2011. That was Panda Update 1. Of course, we didn’t call it Panda 1 then, because as the first Panda Update, it was just called “The Panda Update.”

Two months later, Google made a huge change to Panda, so the next version was called Panda 2. But when the third release happened, and people started calling that Panda 3, Google said that because the changes to the filter weren’t so dramatic, it would better be called Panda 2.1.

This one should be big. I specifically asked, what will SEOs be talking about in 2013? What will be the next big Google algorithmic change that is the talk of 2013 amongst SEOs and Webmasters.

Matt did not mention the merchant quality algorithmbut he did specifically say it might be the next generation of the Penguin update.

Matt said his team is currently working on it and this will be a big change to how Penguin works. So when it is released, sometime in 2013, I assume sooner than later, this will send some ripples through the SEO space.

This would technically be named Penguin 4. The last official Penguin release was Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012, which was over 5 months ago. In fact, we only had two updates to Penguin since it's original release on April 24, 2012: