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It has been ten years since Google introduced the Penguin algorithm and took stricter action against unethical link-building tactics, formerly known as Google Penguin Update.
The algorithm has been updated several times and has now become a real-time part of the main Google algorithm; as a result, penalties have become less common, but they still exist in both partial and site-wide formats.
Google claims to overlook the majority of low-quality links on the internet, but it is nevertheless on the lookout for unnatural tactics such as link schemes, PBNs, link swaps, and unnatural outbound linking structures.
What is a Google Penguin Update?
The Google Penguin Update, often known as the ‘Webspam Algorithm Update‘, was released in 2012. Google built it to assist in minimizing the number of sites that appeared in SERPs that were using black hat SEO strategies to manipulate results through link schemes. It is now also a component of Google’s main algorithm.
What is the difference between Google Panda and Penguin Update?
Since the two primary Google updates against webspam have become part of the core algorithm, webmasters and SEOs can no longer distinguish which element has been modified. It’s no longer worth it for webmasters and SEOs to focus on approaches that were effective even a few years ago.
Google has utilized Penguin and Panda to get webmasters and SEOs to focus on user interests, and optimization is no longer simply for search engines. Website owners are more motivated than ever to develop high-quality content and technically faultless websites. Short-term SEO tactics or black hat strategies are becoming ineffective or have already been rendered ineffective.
How does the Google Penguin Update work?
Looking at Google Webmaster Tools and keeping an eye on your traffic should generally be enough to determine whether your page has been subject to a Penguin penalty. Since Penguin is a page-specific upgrade, you’ll see a significant drop in rankings for particular keywords. As an example of a page affected by Penguin, Google provided these traffic statistics.
The Penguin Update works by crawling web pages and providing a score to each backlink. The Penguin Update will focus on the following backlinks:
- Purchased links
- Backlinks from unreliable sources
- Backlinks with the same anchor text
- Bot-generated backlinks
- Backlinks from completely irrelevant websites
When were the Penguin updates made?
- On April 24, 2012, Google Penguin published its first update. Penguin 1.0 is another name for it. Late that year, there were two data updates. The algorithm itself was not altered in this case; only the database required for it was.
- Penguin 2.0 received its second update on May 22, 2013. Google performed another data refresh almost four months later.
- Google launched the Penguin 3.0 update on October 17, 2014. Previously, all updates had to be done manually.
- The Penguin 4.0 update, which was released in the fall of 2016, became a component of the so-called Google core algorithm. Since then, further Penguin tweaks have been made on a regular basis, much like changes to the Panda update, and are no longer manual.
Why was Google Penguin needed?
Google’s war against low-quality content began with the Panda algorithm, and Penguin was an extension and addition to the arsenal. Penguin was Google’s response to the growing practice of using black hat link-building techniques to manipulate search results (and ranks).
The goal of the algorithm was to have more control over and lessen the effectiveness of, a variety of blackhat spamming strategies.
Penguin attempted to ensure that natural, authoritative, and relevant links rewarded the websites they linked to, while manipulative and spammy links were degraded, by better understanding and processing the types of links domains and webmasters were earning. Penguin only deals with incoming links to a website. Google only considers links pointing to the site in question and does not consider any outgoing connections from that site.
How can I find out if I’ve been hit by Google Penguin Algorithm?
To begin, it’s critical to distinguish between Penguin and a manual punishment for unnatural connecting. In summary, Penguin is a Google index filter that applies to all websites, whereas a manual penalty applies to a single website that Google has decided to be spamming. These human penalties could be the consequence of a website being reported for spam by Google users, and it’s also possible that Google will manually monitor specific industries (such as payday loan companies) more than others (like cupcake bakeries).
If the metrics on your website reveal a decline in ranks or traffic on a date linked with a Penguin update, you may have been impacted by this filter. Make certain that you’ve ruled out expected traffic fluctuations due to phenomena such as seasonality (for example, a Christmas tree farm in April), and carefully consider whether your keyword optimization or linking practices would be deemed spammy by Google, making your site vulnerable to an update such as Penguin.
How do I recover after being penalized by a Penguin update?
You do not submit a reconsideration request to Google to have a Penguin penalty lifted, in contrast to a manual link penalty, for which you must do so after cleaning your website. Instead, fixing issues will frequently result in “forgiveness” the following time Googlebot visits your site. These recovery steps consist of:
- Any unnatural links that you have control over, including links that you have created yourself or have caused to be placed on websites owned by third parties, must be removed.
- the disavowal (using Google Disavow Tool) of spammy links that are outside of your control
- Your website’s content should be revised to address over-optimization and to ensure that keywords have been incorporated naturally rather than mechanically, repeatedly, or senselessly on pages where there is no connection between the subject and the keywords being utilized.
In conclusion, Penguin was developed to address a serious flaw in Google’s system that allowed for their algorithm to be “tricked” by numerous low-quality connections and overly keyword-optimized pages. All content you produce should represent natural language, and your link-earning and building techniques must be regarded as “safe” in order to prevent Google from devaluing your website for spam practices.
More about the Penguin update
Initially introduced as a separate “filter” through which search results were passed, Penguin was later integrated into the main search engine ranking algorithm, according to a Google announcement made in September 2016.
According to Google employee John Mueller, Penguin is a “site-wide algorithm” which means that the presence of many low-quality links pointing to a single page on your website may cause Google to have less faith in your entire website. Some SEOs, however, claim that Penguin 4.0 may have slightly eased the filter such that it is no longer punishing entire sites.
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