Penguin 4.0 Is Here!
Buenas noches, Rankers! I’m coming to you from Mexico this week as I’m still on my holidays. I had to tell you this because a couple of days ago, when I was in Vegas, Google announced a Penguin rollout. Finally 4.0 is here! I posted a short blog on the subject a couple of days ago, but I thought I’d follow it up with greater detail.
What is New?
So what do we know about it? The good news is that if you have been hit by Penguin you can now recover a lot more quickly because it is real time. This is the first Penguin update in two years, and previously if you’d been hit by Penguin you’d be waiting until now, even if you’d done all your disavows and everything else, to see any ranking improvement.
So the fact that the Penguin update is now real time means that if you have been penalised you don’t have to wait months and months, sometimes years, until you can recover from it. So if you’ve done all your disavows and those sorts of normal things that you would do to recover from a Penguin update you can do that now and you should start to see some immediate results which will help return your rankings to normal far more quickly.
Little Temperature Change
Interestingly though, the temperature checkers are not showing much.
This is MozCast. The 13th September shows a spike but I’m not sure of the reason behind it. We did see a change on the 1st September and we brought that one to you, but if you look down the end of the month on the graph Google is saying that it is pretty much rolled out but we aren’t seeing many changes. Back on the 13th, we see a reversal of many of the results from the 1st. It was almost as if someone at Google tripped over something and ended up reversing the results. I don’t know. That is Google for you.
Certainly the temperature checkers aren’t showing us anything with this Penguin 4.0 update.
Punishing Spam
I went back to a post I wrote in February of this year where I did a video showing you some really spammy searches and sites that were ranking, but really spammy. The search was ëSkip Binsí and the top result here was mobileskips.com.au. They had about 53 different domains linking to them, which at the time I said was ridiculous for a skip bin company.
They are now gone. I certainly can’t find them in the top 20 results.
If I check the Google AdWords Ad Preview Tool you can see I have “Melbourne” selected and we have no mobile skips in the top 10. They are gone. Some of the other sites that are there, incidentally, haven’t got many back links at all.
There are a lot of keyword-rich domains in the searches that are ranking well, but I fear Google will start turning that down eventually. If I check rentaskip.com.au I can see they have 43 referring domains as well. They may have already disavowed these, but they are number one for skip bins.í From what I can see they do have some spammy back links but I don’t know whether they’ve disavowed a lot of these and maybe Google isn’t counting these domains.
Mobileskips.com.au has definitely gone, but that is the only one I’ve seen. There is been a bit of movement, but some of the results with spammy back links are still up there, so it is hard to know.
Page Specific Penalties
The other thing with the Penguin update that Google has said is that it is only affecting specific pages. Where as in the past, a Penguin update would smash whole domains, this one is only looking at pages that might have lots of back links directed to them. If that happens to be your homepage, then it will have a significant impact on your rankings. The good news is you should be able to recover quickly if you have been hit.
If you have been hit, please let us know, as I’d love to have a look and see how quickly you can recover. That is it for this week from Mexico. Next week I’m in Cuba where I don’t believe there is much of an Internet, so we may not have a show next week. If not, I will see you all when I get back. Hopefully that was helpful. Thanks. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
