Google has formally confirmed on their webmasters blog that the introduction of Penguin 4.0 has now begun to roll out. Very importantly, it is now featured within their core algorithm, has been updated in real time and runs on a more granular basis. Google penguin was launched first in April 2012 with the objective of targeting black hat webspam. Google expressed this in 2012, because those who use utilize methods that do not benefit consumers, where the aim is to seek for loopholes or shortcuts that would rank pages more than they deserve to be ranked. Specifically, google states keyword stuffing and link schemes. Eventually, the update wanted to penalize those websites that are violating google quality guidelines, with a main focus on above mentioned points.
While there have been quite a few number of updates since the initial launch during 2012, the very previous update was penguin 3.0 in 2014. There has been more discussion in the SEO community regarding the length of time taken by google to launch a subsequent update, with several webmasters having to look forward it for their website to restore from penalty. There has been some essential volatility in search engine result pages, since the start of September, however checking into the recent chatter on different SEO forums, the chatter specifically relating to penguin or those observing improvements in penguin hit sites only started lately. Considering the announcement made by google, there is certain significant news related to the changing nature of penguin.
Penguin is real-time now. Historically, the list of sites influenced by penguin was refreshed periodically at the same time. Once a webmaster enhanced their website considerably and its presence online, most of the google’s algorithms would take that into account fast, however others, such as penguin, have to be refreshed. With this modification, penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, thus changes with be visible faster, normally taking effect soon after a page is re-indexed and recrawled. Penguin is also more granular now. Penguin devalues spam now by adjusting the ranking according to the spam signals instead of affecting the rank of the whole site. It is interesting that in a same way to when the Panda algorithm was integrated into core algorithm, future comments of penguin changes will not be changed. This makes it more hard to isolate any webspam modifications, however while frustrating, it must also make it very difficult for the black hat practitioners to game the system.
One of the most notable impacts of new changes, although, is that it will not take long time to restore from penguin when you are affected. Google refers that changes will come into effect shortly after they reindex or recrawl a page. One particular thing, although, that they are quiet on is precisely how long does it takes for URLs to take effect. It indeed makes no sense for this to occur quickly as it might be gamed by black hat SEO. That having said, with the algorithm being more granular, it appears that any penalty will be made on page by page basis. This has the great potential to blunt the consequence of any penalty significantly and it is not anything surprise if this could benefit black hat SEO in long run. It is not clear how long it would take for the update to take effect, however it is suspected that it would take weeks or even months or more for google to completely recrawl the wholeness of the web.
The last update core algorithm of Google has to be consistent enough to work by itself without worry that it would not take right. Panda is a part of core ranking algorithm of google that has experienced SEOs buzzing about what being part of core algorithm exactly. Google has now shared some more details, describing that the algorithm is constant enough to not need more changes in the future and can work with not more hand-holding.
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