{"id":1491,"date":"2016-09-23T13:18:20","date_gmt":"2016-09-23T13:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.searchenginewatch.com\/2016\/09\/23\/penguin-4-0-is-finally-here-google-confirms\/"},"modified":"2020-02-25T17:17:47","modified_gmt":"2020-02-25T17:17:47","slug":"penguin-4-0-is-finally-here-google-confirms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/2016\/09\/23\/penguin-4-0-is-finally-here-google-confirms\/","title":{"rendered":"Penguin 4.0 is finally here, Google confirms"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a couple of\u00a0years waiting, and various algorithm fluctuations<\/a> described as ‘normal turbulence’, Google\u00a0has finally confirmed today that its Penguin algorithm update is rolling out in all languages.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The last update in\u00a02014 – Penguin 3.0 –\u00a0may have only affected less than 1% of US\/UK searches, but that ultimately translated to 12 billion queries.<\/p>\n

Here we’ll detail all the changes you can expect from Penguin 4.0 according to Google’s blog post<\/a>. But first a little refresher…<\/p>\n

What is Penguin?<\/h2>\n

According to Adam Stetzer in his post on the delayed Penguin update<\/a>, Google<\/a> first launched the Penguin update in April 2012 to catch sites spamming the search results. Specifically the ones who used link schemes to manipulate search rankings.<\/p>\n

Penguin basically hunts down inorganic links; the ones bought or placed solely for the sake of improving search rankings.<\/p>\n

Before Penguin, bad links were simply devalued and needed to be replaced in order to recover search rankings.<\/p>\n

But according to Chuck Price<\/a>, after Penguin, bad links became \u2018toxic\u2019, requiring a link audit and removal or disavow of spammy links and\u00a0a Penguin refresh was usually required before one could see any signs of recovery. This could take a while.<\/p>\n

Thankfully\u00a0this one of the things addressed in today’s update…<\/p>\n

What to expect from Penguin 4.0<\/h2>\n

The following\u00a0improvements were\u00a0among webmasters’ top requests to Google<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Penguin is now real-time<\/b><\/h3>\n

As we stated earlier,\u00a0the list of sites affected by Penguin was only periodically refreshed at the same time.<\/p>\n

According to Google..<\/p>\n

“Once a webmaster considerably improved their site and its presence on the internet, many of Google’s algorithms would take that into consideration very fast, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed.”<\/p>\n

But now, Penguin data is refreshed in real time, so any changes will be made as soon as the affected page has been recrawled and reindexed.<\/p>\n

Google also states that it not\u00a0going to comment on future refreshes.<\/p>\n

Penguin is now more granular<\/b><\/h3>\n

Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.<\/p>\n

So any penalties<\/a> will be delivered to a specific page rather than an entire domain, which seems much fairer in the long run.<\/p>\n

We’ll bring you more information and follow-up stories on the update as soon as we have\u00a0more insight.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a couple of years waiting, and various algorithm fluctuations described as ‘normal turbulence’, Google has finally confirmed today that it’s Penguin algorithm update is rolling out in all languages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":1296,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11],"tags":[37,341,1237,1017],"content_type":[27095],"class_list":["post-1491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry","category-more-news","tag-google","tag-google-algorithm","tag-google-penalties","tag-penguin-4-0","content_type-news"],"acf":{"tad_independentcommercial":false,"tad_content_format":false},"post_info":{"name":"Christopher Ratcliff","title":"","thumbnail_url":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Pygoscelis_papua_-Nagasaki_Penguin_Aquarium_-swimming_underwater-8a-1-120x90.jpg","category":"Industry","timeago":"9y"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/136"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1491"},{"taxonomy":"content_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content_type?post=1491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}