Oct 21, 2014

As you already know, Google launched Penguin 3.0 late Friday. But yesterday, Google's John Mueller said he believed the roll out was complete but then hours later stepped back on that.

Today we learn from Google's Pierre Far on Google+ that the roll out is far from complete, that it is still rolling out and will so for the "next few weeks."

Pierre said, "it’s a slow worldwide rollout, so you may notice it settling down over the next few weeks."

Pierre also confirmed, once again, the rollout began "last Friday," but added that it "affecting fewer than 1% of queries in US English search results." He also stated the obvious about any algorithm update:

This refresh helps sites that have already cleaned up the webspam signals discovered in the previous Penguin iteration, and demotes sites with newly-discovered spam.

But the key here, Pierre said "refresh," which means to me there were no new signals added to the algorithm, that the only thing Google did was rerun the algorithm. Why couldn't they just "refresh" the algorithm several months ago is beyond me. I thought we were waiting for a major rewrite that adds more signals and makes it faster to run?

Penguin 3.0 Recap

• Started rolling out late Friday night, October 17th
• Will continue to roll out for next few weeks
• Is a worldwide roll out
• Impacts less than 1% of English queries (but may have a smaller or greater impact in other languages)
• Only a refresh, no new signals added
• It helps sites recover from previous Penguin updates that fixed their link profile
• It demotes sites that have a bad link profile