It seems that Google is planning a major search algorithm update before the year ends. John Mueller, Webmaster Trends analyst for the tech giant, revealed that there is a huge chance that they will roll out Penguin 3.0 this 2014. This basically means that webmasters, SEO practitioners, and online marketers are likely to make another round of adjustments to their online marketing tactics to keep up with the upcoming changes.
My guess is yes. But, as always, there are always things that can happen in between. I’m pretty confident we’ll have something in the reasonable future,” Mueller said after revealing earlier that Google is currently working on a Penguin update. However, despite this edifying piece of information, Mueller did not tell exactly when the tech giant is planning to launch the update.
With Penguin 3.0, webmasters can expect a faster response time from Google. According to Mueller, they wanted to “speed things up” because today, when webmasters fix certain issues, it usually takes some time before they are recognised by Google’s search algorithm.
That’s something where we’re trying to kind of speed things up because we see that this is a bit of a problem when webmasters want to fix their problems, they actually go and fix these issues but our algorithms don’t reflect that in a reasonable time, so that’s something where it makes sense to try to improve the speed of our algorithms overall,” Mueller explained.
Mueller also shared that it is possible for webmasters to change their sites to improve their respective rankings without a Penguin update. According to the Webmaster Trends analyst, webmasters and site owners should focus on “cleaning up” site issues and ensuring that their websites are as good as they can be. They should avoid focusing on individual factors of individual algorithms if they want to get better search rankings.
Meanwhile, Google recently announced that it has updated the Google Webmaster Tools API to make it “at par” with other Google APIs. The update gives site owners access to some of the main features of Webmaster Tools, making it much easier for them to authenticate their sites for apps or web services.
With the revamped API, they can now list, add, or remove sites from their account, as well as sitemaps for their websites. They could also get warning, error, and indexed counts for individual sitemaps and a time series of all kinds of crawl errors for their websites among other things.
