In it’s fourth release Google’s Penguin algorithm, has turned its signature spam section code, into a real-time signal, entrenched within its core search algorithm. Since its inception in 2012, Penguin has been busy capturing and controlling websites with a penchant for spamming search results. This new update will make it more efficient than ever.
The internet community seems to think so, yes. Previously only used on a periodic basis, Penguin would catch and penalise sites that they considered to be too “spammy”. Whilst being a great idea in theory, the internet behemoths lost kudos by insisting that any website caught the initial clean ups, would remain penalised until the next update. To the end user this meant you could work hard on improving your site, but still have to wait for another refresh to have any penalties revoked.
But from September 2016, long delays in releasing websites from the Google sin bin, appear to be over. With the newest Penguin offering real-time captures, all that constant crawling and indexing of pages, will allow sites to be caught or freed on a regular basis. Google themselves addressed issue with the following statement the new website states;
“Previous delays will 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”
Another downfall of previous releases was that Penguin effectively “blacklisted” sites that did not comply. According to Google themselves, Penguin 4.0 will now provide a “more granular” algorithm, meaning that the discovery of content that could be subject to a penalty, might no longer effect your whole site. Their website tells us;
“Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site. This means it affects finer granularity than just whole sites”
Simply put, it aims to look at the “grains” of each website. The new release will crawl in much more detail than it ever has before, possibly even impacting on specific pages or even sections of a site. It has the ability to target specific pages or keyword searches, rather than just operating a blanket crawl.
No further Google Penguin updates to be announced
We guess, that’s because they won’t need to. With the new release being a dedicated real-time update, Google has said that it will no longer confirm further Penguin updates. As it is now able to evaluate websites in real-time and increase or decrease their rankings appropriately, there really wont be anything to confirm.
This real-time Penguin update is probably not quite fully live just yet. Google admitted they are in the process of “rolling it out”, although they have not suggested how long this will take. We suspect that is will be sooner rather than later, and no doubt information on the scope of this most recent release will become clearer when we start seeing the effects of the penalty.
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