The Thought Police robot is showing Eric no mercy, and it used to be that if your site ran afoul of Google Penguin, you would see no mercy either for months or even years. Thankfully, all that has changed now.
In this video find out why Penguin 4.0 is a kinder and gentler Penguin update.
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Resources Mentioned
Transcript
Mark: So, Eric, after two years of waiting since the Penguin 3.0 update, Google finally released Penguin 4. Now, why did it take so long?
Eric: Well, early in 2016, in one of our virtual keynotes with Google’s Gary Illyes, he told us that Google was taking the time to make sure that the 4.0 update was really working in the way they wanted it to.
Mark: But I’m sure they had that concern with all the Penguin updates. I mean, why the extra time spent on this one?
Eric: Well, because starting with this update, Penguin would be incorporated into the main algorithm and run in real time. So, there’ll be no further announced updates. Sure, it will always be improved, but for all intents and purposes, this is now the permanent form of Penguin.
Penguin Changes
Mark: So, okay, before we get into what that means, let’s review what Penguin has been up until now.
Eric: Sure. For one thing, old Penguin evaluated sites as a whole. If there was a pattern of suspicious links pointing to the site, the entire site was penalized. And even worse, once the site was penalized, in most cases, it couldn’t get out of “Penguin jail” until the next data refresh, which could be months, or in the final event, even years.
Mark: So, how is Penguin 4 different?
Eric: It’s different in several ways. First, Penguin 4 evaluates links on the fly, meaning it assesses the value of links as Google’s crawl bot discovers them on the Web. Second, Penguin is more granular. That is, it discounts bad links rather than penalizing the site, and therefore, only impacts the pages that would have received value from those links if they had, in fact, counted.
Mark: Now, we heard that Penguin 4 is real-time, as you said, but what does that mean?
Eric: Well, it does not mean that any link adjustments are applied instantaneously, however, they’re applied right after the next time the Google bot crawls the site, or in this case, the page being linked to by those links.
What to Do About Penguin 4
Mark: So, what should site owners do about Penguin 4?
Eric: Well, in one sense, nothing.
Mark: Wait. Nothing? What?
Eric: Well, nothing insofar as there are no specific actions one can take. Any bad links pointing at your site simply lose their value. In reality, what site owners should do is not bother trying to build suspicious links to their sites, as Penguin will eventually discount them anyway. And for any pages you think might have been hit by Penguin, just do your best to improve them or earn good links instead of adding, well, crappy links.
Mark: So, there’s a lot more to learn about Penguin 4 and how you should respond to it as a site owner, and you can learn all of that in Eric’s very thorough article on our Perficient Digital blog.
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Guau, great post.
Thanks for sharing
It’s really nice. He says, Well, nothing insofar as there are no specific actions one can take. Any bad links pointing at your site simply lose their value. thank you
Penguin this time did only good to my site, mainly by killing a lot of spammers in our field. the thing is, that they slowly started to decline and not sharply fell from grace.