Question: Any news about next Penguin update? Potential release date? Something more about new factors? Monthly update and possible recovery? Everyone punished gets notification?
John: At the moment I don’t have anything to update you in regards to the penguin update but I know the engineers are working on something that should be available fairly anytime soon. I don’t have any specific time frame when it comes to penguin update so not today, not tomorrow, but I am guessing pretty soon certainly by the end of the year is my current guess. And when it comes to time frames about algorithms it is always a bit tricky when you are looking at something in Google’s web search because on the other hand we have to make all the changes but we need to go through these algorithms and the test data to make sure everything works fine and on the other hand we also have to kind of review the data that gets generated there and that it is actually useful data that is really providing useful additional information in search and not just something that is actually running but not have any real value in it. So that is something we are aware that is happening in the process well when working on the algorithm the data that seems to be created from the algorithm should be good. That is the reason we cannot say when it will actually be ready. So if everything goes well then the process happens that much faster but if something goes wrong then we have to rethink oh we have a problem then it will take a week longer or a month longer that is all I can say.
Question: The problem here is some webmasters are saying it’s here, its live, so in this hangout can you be a bit more transparent can you give some more data, people are saying penguin is already out ?
Answer This is something that we do run test from time to time to see how things kind of react where we do live test, we do that a lot with features in web search for example that is one place where it is particularly visible where we will do on 1% of the traffic or maybe we do on more 3 or 4 or 5% of the traffic data with our updated algorithm and see if that really brings out measures that shows actually good change in that. So there are good possibility of things that people are expected to see from time to time whether it is specifically from the penguin algorithm or not is kind of uncertain because if you are looking at specific UI information in search you don’t really see what’s in that search.
Question: So just to be clear Gary said last week that if you disavowed something 2 weeks or so then those disavowed will not be included in the next coming penguin algorithm? He said that clearly don’t know whether you were there or not ?
Answer: I don’t know that is something that is currently looked at. I know you guys are waiting for this and I know that lot of people have put in a lot of effort actually to clean all these issues but there are probably other sites that never bother cleaning up and continue doing micro spam things and that is something those sites won’t probably see changes but I know there are really many well intention webmasters out there who notice the back links problems, solve the issue coming up and work to clean that up so we are happy to kind of get the word out when it really comes out.
Question: There is a clear feeling that the site won’t just come up cleaning things after penguin update, there are so many other things that might need to be looked at?
Answer: Well, you can never say that my site was ranking No.2 one year ago and this algorithm brought my site to No.10 and therefore after this algorithm is refreshed my site will be back at No.2. There are so many things that happens in web search over the year that you cannot really expect things to be exactly the same if you cleaned up this problem. Other thing is if you site is unnaturally ranking higher then there is a problem. If for example if your site has lot of unnatural backlinks and we have incorrectly counted that for your site and that time you might rank higher than now where if you remove all of those backlinks then you stay in current state, so that is something we also keep in mind but I know there are a lot of people who take a lot of time to clean things up and really improve the website in all possible manner . I am hoping that kind of sites will see good results and a nice jump in rankings. But as always said we have a lot of different algorithms and your effort that you are doing working to clean up your site you should have been seeing some of those algorithm change as well. But I know this is a tough topic so I will answer this question but I have other question about penguin update in line now. So let us move on to the next question