If you have wondered whether there would still be manual action link penalties once Penguin moves to being real time, we now know the answer.  Gary Illyes from Google was asked the question on Twitter, and the answer is yes, there will still be manual actions given for link penalties.

Currently, it is possible to be hit by Penguin as well as a manual action, so that isn’t a surprise.  But with Penguin going real time, there was the question on whether all link related actions would solely be given exclusively through Penguin.  But that is not the case.  The good news is that the bad links being acted upon to recover from both Penguin and manual action will be the same – poor quality back links.

We are still waiting to see when Penguin will be going live.  It was suggested that it would be sometimes in 2015, but we are starting to get pretty close to the Christmas holidays and Google has a history of not pushing updates over the Christmas holidays.