Yesterday, At SES San Francisco during the Matt Cutts keynote, Matt answered some questions about the Penguin update that has many SEOs and webmaster shaking in their boots.

Update from Matt Cutts: Matt clarified and gave a lot of context to what he said at SES SF. Here is his comment:

As you know, many SEOs are eagerly awaiting a Penguin update but Matt Cutts, the head of search spam at Google, said “you don’t want the next Penguin update.” He warned that the Google “engineers have been working hard,” on this update.

He even added the next few updates will be “jarring and jolting” for webmasters and SEOs.

I’ve never seen a warning like this before from Google. It makes it sound like the Penguin update will be felt by many many more SEOs. Our initial poll said about 65% of SEOs were hurt by Penguin – why so many more than Panda which was 40%? Well, this is aim more at SEO techniques despite what Google wants to say otherwise.

Honestly, if Matt is saying this, I wouldn’t blame anyone if they are a bit worried.

I wasn’t at the talk, many were and the feedback coming out of it is that Matt was sincere about it. Again, I was not there, so I can’t be certain.

In any event, make sure to brace yourself for the next Penguin update!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.