Google Penguin 4.0 revealed?

If all the chatter over the past 2 weeks is to be believed, then the now well overdue Google Penguin 4.0 algorithm update is going to seriously shake things up with sites breaching guidelines.

It feels like one of those movie moments where you can't see what's coming over the hill, but you can feel the ground shaking angrily with the impending stampede.

The talk of the SEO town is the drastic changes in rankings that appear to be occurring at random. Could this be Google testing Penguin 4.0? I believe it's likely. They don't muck around when it comes to updating their algorithms and this is typically the kind of pattern we see before a release.

My thoughts are that this is going to hit the folks that have abstained from content marketing and technical SEO the hardest, followed by those who have not been paying attention to their link profiles.

One of the biggest gripes I hear all the time from marketers is the old story about being burnt by some sharky, 'Del boy' type SEO company years ago and them swearing off anything to do with organic search marketing forevermore.

The two issues here are:

1) If you're not in the game, how are you ever going to win at it?
2) If those 'Del boy' agencies went and got you a bunch of crappy sponsored "follow" links, you're about to get slapped once again.

In a somewhat unprecedented move, Google themselves have told us that they WILL be announcing the rollout of Penguin 4.0 - something which they usually leave webmasters to figure out for themselves. 

My prediction is that we'll see further signs of rollout in the coming month and a likely announcement in May from the horses mouth.