As you know, there has been a lot of contradictory statements from Google around how Penguin and Panda are run, is it real time, is it manual, how long does it take, when can you recover and so on.

In Friday’s Google Hangout with John Mueller on Google+ John answered a question which may shed some light on why the answers Google has been giving some times seem contradictory. Let me share the exact transcription of the question and answer, which starts at 25:22:

Question:

Answer:

As you can see, Google’s John Mueller is basically saying parts are real time and parts are not but with Penguin (and also currently with Panda), for you to recover, Google does need to run something manually and you need to wait for a refresh. The other aspects around that, the disavow file, your content updates, structural changes, how long it takes Google to pick up on those changes via their crawl, etc is a factor not just on Penguin or Panda but on many real time algorithms.

Here is the video:

Forum discussion at Google+.