7/11/15 - Penguin refresh is "months away"

[Shepherd]

According to Gary Illyes, refresh is months away.

[twitter.com...]

[engine]

I am trying to decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. It's good because new is not getting slapped, and it's bad because those already slapped need a refresh.

Additionally, can we believe the "months away" suggestion!

In the meantime, i'm just going to keep on, keeping on.

[webcentric]

"Wolf, wolf..." All these red herrings are starting to stink.

[RedBar]

So it's "situation normal" with Google these days since everything is so fubard they haven't a clue what to do?

I can build a real world brand new factory faster than these people can switch their monitors on and off!

[Splugged]

Panda is months away...
Penguin is months away...

What the hell ... all employees of google are on sabbatical with Cutts?

[goodroi]

Not surprised since running penguin more frequently costs Google time, money, computing resources, etc. and could endanger Google profits. The faster they run penguin, the easier it is for SEOs to reverse engineer it and escape it. Penguin would be less scary if it was run nightly, enabling you to be hit one night, make changes and escape from it the second night. Some webmasters who are contemplating risky link moves think twice when they realize that getting hit by Penguin can mean losing traffic for many, many months.

For people thinking it is easy let's look at the numbers. Theoretically we'll guess the current Google index is only 30 billion urls. If the penguin program crunches 1,000 urls every second it would still take almost a year to fully run the penguin program. I'm sure Google has better computing resources and can do this dramatically faster. My point is to simply remind everyone the scale and complexity we are talking about.

I am not saying this is nice or that I like Google not running Penguin more often. It sucks. I am just not surprised by Google not running Penguin more frequently.

[Dymero]

Gary recently got intro trouble with SEOs for suggesting Panda is coming soon. So Penguin may indeed be months away, but if for some reason it comes sooner than expected, nobody can complain about the timing anymore.

[engine]

Well, that's exactly the problem with a frequent update to Penguin, gooroi. Google's concept of making it real-time from an algorithmic point of view may still be on-the-cards, however, we're not necessarily going to know until a site truly recovers, or a site is penalised. It may be penalised, or recovered, yet it's SERPs position remains stable until processed via revisits, some time later.

By slowly releasing the changes it'll avoid "the dance," or any kind of dance, which the company moved away from for many years.

[aristotle]

A good algorithm would produce rankings that evolve slowly and gradually in accordance with changes on the web. Sudden drastic "shakeups", such as Panda and Penguin can produce, are a clear sign of a poor algorithm. Either something was badly wrong just before the drastic change, or is badly wrong just afterward, or mostly likely, both before and after.

[samwest]

@engine - it's likely to be ANOTHER bad thing...what's been good since 2010? All punitive updates.

[engine]

@samwest those that have note been hit because there's no refresh, that's a good thing!

I'm also sure it'll be another way to catch the sites that got away, or to penalise sites that have changed their approach since Penguin started.

[rish3]

Panda and Penguin seem to share the "outboard of the actual base algorithm" architecture, where they run separately, then some cumbersome process is required to integrate their data into the actual SERPS.

Seems like either that process is broken, or their preview / sanity test of the data scares them off from running it.

"the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart."

[RedBar]

If the penguin program crunches 1,000 urls every second it would still take almost a year to fully run the penguin program.

That has to be way, way out, 5 years ago Google confirmed it had 900,000 servers, two years ago MS said it had 1,000,000+ and that Google had more, I agree with rish3:

Seems like either that process is broken, or their preview / sanity test of the data scares them off from running it.

Would a run finally break the thing altogether?

[supercyberbob]

I think it's pretty super obvious that it's broken, as is Panda.

I'm also beginning to suspect there's a giant mess behind closed doors that most of us are oblivious to (EU antitrust investigation etc).

And Cut(t)s leaving and then suddenly Panda and Penguin being awol is also too good of a coincidence.

...

[Leosghost]

They run it, they don't run it..the rest of what they say is spreading FUD ( and them looking to see who jumps when they say frog )..to be ignored..

[seoskunk]

I think I am seeing signs of Google becoming a lost marketplace, two people spoke to me today about adverts not converting in Google, both were professionally setup campaigns and user experience was good when I looked, people seem to be choosing high ranking brand websites to buy from instead of adverts. Google is eating away at its own ecosystem by not refreshing these algo's more often and allowing more competition in the SERPS.

[aristotle]

The less often Penguin and Panda are run, the more out-of-date are Google's search results. Spammers and fly-by-night artists have more time to grab profits before they are finally caught. And people who have corrected their website's "problems" have to wait longer to get their deserved higher rankings.

Thus Google's search results are always out-of-date, with spammers continuing to prosper and improved sites being unjustly punished. This harms not only searchers but also society as a whole,.

[toidi]

If they run any of these updates it will upset their manipulation which will force them to forgive the preferred violators. This will cause an unproar and be more ovidence of manipulation.

Can it still be called an algorithm when it is manually manipulated?

[samwest]

Not to get off topic, and certainly not to defend Google, but is it possible that some other force is throttling internet traffic? A group of observers that communicate daily all see common drops or increases in email activity on days with poor traffic. I find it hard to believe that a company with this level of resources could be so incredibly messed up...then again...we're at new lows when things should be picking up seasonally.

[Shepherd]

I find it hard to believe that a company with this level of resources could be so incredibly messed up

I'm looking at google's reported adwords revenue since Penguin launched and I'm not seeing any evidence of a company that could be considered "messed up".

[Ebuzz]

While we are talking about this Penguin refresh that is months away, what happened to the Panda refresh that was supposed to take place by now?

[samwest]

Shep - it all depends on your point of view. We expect Google to serve us, Google expects to serve itself. Of course one of those is grossly incorrect. Guess which?

ebuzz - it appears to have happened, without a lot of fanfare, but once again punitive....at least from my perspective.

[Shepherd]

We expect Google to serve us

I don't have any such delusions ;) google has been a direct competitor of ours for years now and we treat each other accordingly.

[samwest]

No doubt.

[aakk9999]

While we are talking about this Penguin refresh that is months away, what happened to the Panda refresh that was supposed to take place by now?

I was wondering on this too.