Penguin 4.0 Is Finally Here
I’m flying over El Paso in the USA at the moment but I just had to share.
It’s taken nearly a year since Gary Illyes of Google announced on Twitter that we would have a realtime roll out of Google Penguin 4.0 by “christmas” last year. Yesterday Google finally announced that Google Penguin is now part of it’s core algorithm.
How Penguin Used To Work For SEO Spam
When Google first announced the Penguin update back in 2012 it was a manual update and whole sites were penalised. It was designed to punish sites that were creating bulk low quality (i.e. crap) backlinks to their sites in order to rank higher. For the most part this was great for webmasters who were focusing on creating content and getting backlinks from building their audience and their brand. The problem with it was a lot of businesses were affected who did not know they had employed SEOs that were creating these backlinks on their behalf. Later that year Google released the disavow tool so webmasters could tell Google to ignore links that they could not remove manually. However webmasters still had to wait months and years until Google did another manual update of Penguin before they wopuld see their rankings return. Some webmasters have been waiting since 2014 for this update.
The Good News
Quicker Recovery
- Now if you have been hit by Penguin, in theory you should be able to recover from it relatively quickly by doing the normal Penguin recovery processes.
A More Focused Penguin
- Penguin used to affect whole sites now it will only affect the pages with the spammy backlinks. If that is your home page though that is still a big issue 🙂
The Bad News
You may have been hit by Penguin. Although to be perfectly honest I’m not seeing massive changes in the serps yet in .com.au anyway. In fact the so called “temperature checkers” of the Google algorithm like mozcast are showing no abnormal activity. I have seen changes on previous extremely spammy searches like “cheap skip bin hire” but certainly nothing like we have seen with previous Google Penguin updates.
Google’s announcement can be found here.
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/09/penguin-is-now-part-of-our-core.html
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
