Google Penguin…
Far from the cute, aquatic bird that we know and love, the term ‘Penguin’ has become the blight of many SEO enthusiasts and businesses looking to make it big on the web. It has been just over two years since the third incarnation of Google Penguin, but the new update and fourth version has just landed and whilst it will be its last, it has a new real-time filter which provides something that Google’s favoured spamming systems can’t.
The wait is over – in more ways than one!
It’s been a long two years since Penguin 3.0, but as we touched on briefly Penguin 4.0’s new real time filter has been specially designed to catch out the sites that have blighted the search results. These sites have remained undetected by Google’s usual anti-spam practices. With the Penguin filter these sites can now be caught and penalised, the real time difference being that instead of a site remaining penalised even if they improved and changed, they wouldn’t have to wait months for the next filter run to be ‘set free’.
Thanks to Penguin’s real time capacity, sites that have been penalised don’t have to face long delays to redeem themselves, instead Google re-crawls and re-indexes continuously, constantly assessing quality via the new Penguin filter. As it is a nonstop process, Google will no longer confirm future Penguin updates.
Google’s promise to the web
The real time aspect is ground-breaking in the SEO world, and gives a second chance to sites that have been deemed spammy as well as being on constant lookout for pages that need to be caught and subsequently given less visibility. The changes that are made to your website are visible at a much faster rate, and this not only has an impact site-wide but across every page. The targeted approach will also mean that spam is devalued at page level instead of affecting the entire ranking of the website.
Rolling out to a site near you
As usual when the update is fully live is a fact shrouded in secrecy. Google has confirmed that it is ‘rolling out’ the real-time Penguin update but has not confirmed how long this will take. Although whilst we suspect that Penguin 4.0 is not fully live yet, it will only take a few weeks, although, like other search engine optimisation specialists, we can’t say for sure!
