Panda is an Old Pro While Penguin is Still Growing
Panda and Penguin updates have been the topic of discussion ever since they arrived on the scene knocking sites out of the rankings right and left. The good news is that Panda has finally started to settle down with very small tweaks done on a consistent monthly basis. Most are so small they aren't even noticed.
Google's Matt Cutts, a keynote speaker at SES San Francisco, confirmed this about Panda but then went on to warn about Penguin in this statement, "Penguin is still in an early stage, whereas Panda is now monthly and they understand it very well. Google is still iterating Penguin, so the changes will be jolting for a while."
As you can imagine 'jolting' Penguin updates has webmasters everywhere concerned. Matt later gave a little more detail in response to posts by Barry Schwatrz and was quoted saying...
"...I wasn't saying that people needed to overly stress out about the next Penguin update, but I'm happy to give more details. I was giving context on the fact that lots of people were asking me when the next Penguin update would happen, as if they expected Penguin updates to happen on a monthly basis and as if Penguin would only involve data refreshes.
If you remember, in the early days of Panda, it took several months for us to iterate on the algorithm, and the Panda impact tended to be somewhat larger (e.g. the April 2011 update incorporated new signals like sites that users block). Later on, the Panda updates had less impact over time as we stabilized the signals/algorithm and Panda moved closer to near-monthly updates. Likewise, we're still in the early stages of Penguin where the engineers are incorporating new signals and iterating to improve the algorithm. Because of that, expect that the next few Penguin updates will take longer, incorporate additional signals, and as a result will have more noticeable impact. It's not the case that people should just expect data refreshes for Penguin quite yet."
He was then quoted as saying "you don't want the next Penguin update." and went on to ominously say that Go...
