Some site owners who have been impacted by Penguin have been waiting for quite some time for a Penguin update to happen.  While we know that the next Penguin will bring a new real-time Penguin, playing the waiting game in the meantime has been tough.

In last week’s Google Webmaster Hangout with John Mueller, he was asked about whether a site owner could request a manual Penguin refresh or update for a site, bypassing long wait.  And not surprisingly, the answer is no.

So we don’t do manual updates for a lot of our algorithms, we essentially wait for the algorithms to get updated to run automatically.  So there’s no manual update that’s possible in cases like this.

If you fix all the issues, then with the next update, then that’ll probably look a little bit better.

This does make a lot of sense.  If Google was doing this for those who requested it, it would be unfair for all those sites impacted by Penguin who might not be aware they could do a request for it – especially since no notices show up in Google Search Console for Penguin issues.  This way, Google is treating all sites impacted by Penguin the same way, without giving special treatment to some sites.

And of course, he did include his obligatory “I don’t know when Penguin will update” disclaimer as well.

I don’t have any timing on these updates when they’re not announced yet.

So if you are impacted by Penguin, the waiting game continues, but hopefully for not much longer.