Yesterday at SMX West in the How Google Works: A Google Ranking Engineer's Story session Gary Illyes of Google was asked about the Penguin 4.0 update. He basically said, he is done giving out estimates for when it will launch because he has been wrong about those dates thus far three or four times already. He added, "it's bad for business" when he gets those dates wrong.
To those hit by Penguin, this is not too funny. But the truth is, Gary wants to see it launch but he has no direct control over the launch date. He knows the engineers are working on it and want to launch it but it just isn't live yet, sadly.
Like you know, Penguin 4.0 is expected to launch this quarter but before that we expected it in January and then in 2015.
It is now about 16.5 months since Penguin 3.0 launched and many many are still stuck with no way to recover.
Forum discussion at Twitter.