Not much of a surprise, but Gary Illyes from Google confirmed at SMX that Google Engineers are still working on the Google Penguin algo.

Ilyes also said he is giving up on giving out dates for Penguin, because he doesn’t want to be wrong when he does give out a date and it isn’t made.

Many SEOs hate the “Surprise!” element of various Google algo updates when an update is suddenly released and announced on the same day, especially since many SEOs want to be able to drop everything for deep dive analysis and to see how their own sites or competitor’s sites fared in the update.

On the other hand, when Illyes announces a date and it is missed because it is not quite ready, SEOs get pretty upset about that too.

The upcoming Penguin is going to be moving from a “push button update” to a real-time Penguin so that websites can recover from Penguin issues much faster than in the past.  But in the meantime, the wait for the update is getting pretty long for those hoping to recover.