How to get the corresponding control signal according to the feedback information and respond timely are the key problems for the polarization mode dispersion (PMD) adaptive compensation technique. An adaptive PMD compensation experiment for 10 Gb/s fiber optical system is completed by using a multi-degree of freedom compensator with the power of specific frequency component in the signal spectrum as the feedback signal, with a novel adaptive tracking algorithm. The novel algorithm successfully solves the problem of trapping into local optima, efficiently eliminates the hysteresis of polarization controller (PC) and is adopted in the tracking course with no visible worsening of the feedback signal in the adaptive tracking compensation process. The long term testing with multi-times disturbances shows that the response time for the compensator to recover from a sudden disturbance is at the level of milliseconds.