A Guide to Google’s Penguin 4.0

Google has officially announced the last release of Penguin on September 23rd, 2016, almost after 2 years of long wait. Penguin 4.0 is the last update of this type as from now onwards, it becomes Real Time and is now baked with the Google’s Core Algorithm. It is launched for all countries and languages at the same time.

The first Penguin update was launched by Google in April 2012 to punish the sites that were spamming the search results to rank high by spammy link building practices. Google has shooted periodic updates of Penguin throughout the year. The spammy sites were not regaining their rank even they have removed the spammy links. They have to wait for the last penguin update so that their site can be freed from the penalty. Below is the list of all Penguin Updates:

Penguin is Now Real Time

Before this update, the sites affected by Penguin remained penalized even if they were improved until the next time algorithm updates, which usually takes several months. With the latest release, Penguin now becomes Real-time i.e. penguin has become the part of the core algorithm. As the Google crawls and index pages constantly, the pages will also be assessed by Penguin.  Now the pages will be caught/freed on the regular basis and you will see the positive or negative results faster than before.

Recovery of Improved Websites

If your site is penalized and your webmaster is doing a good job in improving and removing the spammy links, then sooner your website ranking will be improved, right after Google recrawls your website. Google also recommend for using disavow file to help in the recovery of your site from Penguin.

Granularity

Google also announces that the new update is more granular i.e. it’s now page specific. It will affect some of the pages with spammy links, while other pages of the website will rank. Such kind of micro penalties would be difficult to track.
Since Penguin is now merged with the core Algorithm, we will no longer receive an official announcement regarding it. It is a constant process so we will have to monitor our backlink profile on daily basis. The Rolling process has started and will take few days to completely roll out.

Rahul Vij

Co-founded WebSpero solutions about a decade ago. Having worked in web development- I realized the dream of transforming ideas sketched out on paper into fully functioning websites. Seeing how that affected the customers’ generation of leads and conversions, I wanted to delve deeper into the sphere of digital marketing. At Webspero Solutions, handling operations and heading the entire Digital Marketing Field – SEO, PPC, and Content are my core domains. And although we as a team have faced many challenges, we have come far learning along and excelling in this field and making a remarkable online reputation for our work. Having worked in building websites and understanding that sites are bare structures without quality content, the main focus was to branch into optimizing each website for search engines. Investing in original, quality content creation is essential to SEO success in the current search climate. Succeeding in this arena ensures the benefits of producing visitor-friendly content. Directing all our teams to zoom in on these factors has been a role that I have thoroughly enjoyed playing throughout these years. linkedin