Many SEOs have been curious about just what will change when it comes to Penguin.  In yesterday’s Hangout with Eric Enge and Mark Traphagen, Illyes was asked about Penguin and what would be different about Penguin from an SEO perspective.

He did disclaimer his comments that they haven’t talked about how to communicate the changes yet, so he is “making things up as we go.”

The first thing will be that if your pages are affected by Penguin, then generally you will be able to get the read of that effect much faster.  So you would be able to – you would definitely be able to – see that something is going on like your rankings are dropping, you can easily think back to what you did, what you changed, if anything, on the site or external to the site, like site SEO or link building or whatever, and then revert those changes and see if that fixes it.

He was asked for clarification, if it meant more real time feedback.

Of course, we will have to recrawl the pages, and sometimes that can take a lot of time.

Eric Enge summed it up as “real time with the data available, but you don’t have all the data available until you recrawl some things and discover the new data.  So there is natural latency in there,” which Illyes agreed.  Illyes went on to say it is bad SEOs who are causing Penguin issues.

It isn’t innocent people making mistakes, but rather SEOs who are – this will be shocking – there are bad SEOs out there.

He also commented about when he looked at a bunch of penguin affected sites, and what he saw.

The limited sites that I looked at that were affected by Penguin were small businesses, well not actually that many small businesses, well in general businesses that hired an SEO that did something nasty.

So while Penguin will be real time, there will still be a latency as sites that are hosting those links get recrawled.  But it is a good thing that it means as Penguin moves to real time, that it might be a bit easier to pinpoint new links as a possible reason for a loss in rankings.