Last night, Google's head of search spam, Matt Cutts announced at SMX West (which I live blogged and reported at Search Engine Land) that a "next generation" of Penguin is coming in 2013.
This one should be big. I specifically asked, what will SEOs be talking about in 2013? What will be the next big Google algorithmic change that is the talk of 2013 amongst SEOs and Webmasters.
Matt did not mention the merchant quality algorithm but he did specifically say it might be the next generation of the Penguin update.
Matt said his team is currently working on it and this will be a big change to how Penguin works. So when it is released, sometime in 2013, I assume sooner than later, this will send some ripples through the SEO space.
This would technically be named Penguin 4. The last official Penguin release was Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012, which was over 5 months ago. In fact, we only had two updates to Penguin since it's original release on April 24, 2012:
When will Penguin 4 happen? Again, Matt did not say, but if I had to guess, sometime in Q2 2013.
Forum discussion at Google+ and WebmasterWorld.
