The update was rolled out without any official announcement and no major changes were seen even though on October 20th, Monday, Google’s Jon Mueller said that the update was complete and the Penguin 3.0 would affect websites that aren’t clearly articulated in the guidelines of the search engine. However, on October 21st, Tuesday, another statement was issued by Pierre Far, which highlighted that this update was simply another refresh to the previous updates that have already been issued. The purpose of Penguin 3.0 is to benefit websites that have taken the steps of clearing up webspam when penalized by previous iterations of Penguin and demote all those websites that are newly discovered with spam.
He also added that this rollout was going to affect sites globally, but it was a slow process. Therefore, changes to rankings and traffic would become obvious in a couple of weeks as everything settles down. According to the data provided, about 1% of search queries made in English would be affected by this update, but it may affect other language queries more or less; this hasn’t been specified by Google. In simple terms, websites in any region or language will be vulnerable to the impact of Penguin 3.0.
The company hasn’t provided information about any new signals that may have been added to the algorithm in Penguin 3.0 as it has only been dubbed as a refresh. This could mean that the algorithm was simply re-run in order to release websites that have fixed the issues pointed out by previous updates and demote the websites that hadn’t been picked up on. Hence, some websites will see an improvement in rankings if they were penalized in previous updates while others will take a hit if they are using spammy links.
Google has clearly mentioned that Penguin updates focus on linking strategies due to which the following practices should be avoided by websites:
As long as these practices are avoided, the Penguin 3.0 hit wouldn’t affect the websites, meaning their rankings and traffic will stay safe.
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And this is of course of high importance for everyone who is in the internet marketing business. What is even more important is when Google updates its system, choosing as priority different criteria to track down web sites that have flaws. Its latest update is called “Penguin Update” and before that there was the “Panda Update”. While the Panda mainly concentrated on the quality of the content, enormously affecting many web sites, the Penguin is focused on the SEO techniques that don’t pay attention to Google’s “rules” for healthy web site.
More specifically Google Penguin Update ranks the web sites low when they use SEO methods that violate Google’s Guidelines. Methods such as using a big amount of keywords that are not properly putted in the content affect the quality and therefore will be out of the search engine result list. Google is known to be one of the biggest and more important search engines and if you want your web site to succeed in any way you will have to pay attention to these rules.
Other factors affecting Penguin ranking is the content itself. Many web sites in order to gain more visitors steal content from other pages, which is against the rules. According to Google Guidelines the content of every web site must be unique and representative of the web site’s purpose. So if there are two or even more matching contents Google Penguin is notified to clear that out. To add to that, even the same names of web sites (domain name) are tracked and may be included to the black list of low quality web sites.
So far Google Penguin has been updated three times, having a major impact on web sites, even bigger than Google Panda had. You should keep in mind that when you website receives a low rank it will be hard to regain its traffic. Even if you make all the necessary changes to upgrade the content of your web site it still will take time to recover. And you will notice if Google Penguin has an eye on you by checking the traffic continuously and if you see a slow down then you should be worried and act fast.
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