As you have probably already heard, Google’s very own Penguin won’t be updated this year.
However, in a recent Google+ hangout (around the 18:40 mark), John Mueller said that he is confident that Penguin 4.0 will happen in January of the new 2016:
I don’t want to make any date promises but I am hopeful that things are lined up. Since it was kind of on the edge for this year, I’m pretty confident that that’s good enough for January. But I really don’t want to make any announcements on that.
So, in another month or so, we might be looking at another “rave” around the SEO forums as a new black-and-white destroyer emerges.
The next-generation Penguin 4.0 is expected to work in a real-time manner. This means that people won’t have to wait for algorithm pushes or manual actions in order to fix issues, but rather wait for the spider to re-crawl their backlinks and pages.
It has been more than 14 months since Penguin 3.0 was released into the wild. There were some fluctuations at the end of 2014, which indicate that the algorithm was tweaked somewhat.
However, a major update hasn’t happened in a while. Webmasters and SEOs around the world are “excited” to see how this new version will work out for them.
What do you think? Will this update be as massive as previous versions of the algorithm, or it will be just a drop in the bucket? Personally, I highly doubt it.