Source: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/is-google-about-to-kill-penguin/
There has been a lot of talks about when will the next penguin update will take place. A lot of web masters are anticipating that it will be rolled out at the end of the year making it one of the biggest update to take place. It has been mentioned that penguin algorithm will be incorporated in real time which makes disavow tool more effective. We all know that using this tool takes ages before you noticed a recovery and requires a penguin update to see if efforts on disavowing links worked.
The problem with penguin
Being one of the most problematic algorithms, many business both small and large have experienced its negative effect. A recovery would require the next penguin update just to know if efforts on cleaning up the link profile worked or not. Refreshes were only released a couple of times every year and every business affected is still waiting for it at the same time, losing opportunities because of this.
Link spam problem
2012 was the year when businesses started investing on link building to get high ranks quickly in search results. This was a big problem for Google since every business website can just gain instant ranking boost using this tactic without really doing much effort on branding. Since the birth of penguin, unnatural link building practices were shifted to targeting sites that perform well in search results, a.k.a. Negative SEO. Penguin’s main role is to combat web spam and prevent negative SEO, but in the present time, it falls short in solving this problem.
There is a lot of speculation whether it’s true that penguin is expected to run as a part of the algorithm or it’s Google’s way of removing the penguin algorithm altogether. Without penguin, it can eliminate link spam in one swoop by removing signals associate with unnatural links. Identifying relevant and quality links is the key in the success of removing link spam and negative SEO once and for all.