Penguin is now part of Google’s core algorithm
It’s been almost 2 years since the last Penguin 3.0 and now Google finally announced that they are rolling out a new update for Penguin. The nature of this update along with the new key elements makes it the 4th major rollout therefore the Penguin 4.0 and the last of its kind. Right after Panda, Penguin gets to be the second major algorim that gets to be part of Google’s core algorithm.
Penguin is now real-time
One of the biggest problems that webmasters were facing with Penguin was the waiting time till the next update. If you are one of those webmasters that saw their rankings sinking because of Penguin, you already know how frustrating it is the to wait till the next Penguin update. Turning Penguin into a real-time algorithm means that you can recover your website’s rankings way faster than before.
Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. Once a webmaster considerably improved their site and its presence on the internet, many of Google’s algorithms would take that into consideration very fast, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed.
Any website that was previous affected by Penguin will recover faster as soon as they get to fix / cleanup the toxic backlinks, get their affected pages recrawled and reindexed.
With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page.
That real time is not a surprise, in fact John Mueller had announced it back in 2015 that Google was planning to make Penguin a real time algorithm.
Penguin is now more granular
Google said that Penguin is getting to be more granular and instead of affecting an entire website, it will only affect pages or sections based on spam signals by adjusting their rankings.
Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.
Penguin updates will no longer be confirmed by Google
With this update Google said that they will no longer confirm future Penguin updates. That makes perfect sense since all the updates around Penguin will be incorporated within Google’s core algorithm.
It also means we’re not going to comment on future refreshes.
Run a Penguin Recovery
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Have you seen your rankings and visibility sinking?
Act now, see how we can help you recover from Penguin.