The new version of Google’s Penguin filter went live on Friday, October 17 and will be rolling out during the next few weeks. The refresh impacted less than 1% of English search queries. The Penguin algorithm reviews a website’s backlink profile, demoting websites that appear to be spammy or found in violation of Google’s linking guidelines. This is the sixth Penguin release, termed Penguin 3.0 by Search Engine Land and SEOs.
This latest Penguin release was a highly anticipated algorithm update. If a website was hit by the last Penguin release and appropriate corrective changes were made to the site, webmasters couldn’t see if the changes met Google’s rules and requirements until this update occurred.
The last version of Penguin occurred just over a year ago in October 2012. Webmasters and SEO’s have been waiting anxiously to see if the corrective actions they have tried on sites hit by the last update, like removing bad links, have worked. Many hoped and expected that a refresh would have happened earlier in the year and speculated that Google was preparing for a new Penguin algorithm.
Some webmasters and SEO experts may see website ranking drop because Penguin discounted a wide range of links that will no longer carry the weight or “votes” they once did. Websites that benefited from low quality ‘votes’ or links before may have lost visibility as a direct result, and not because Google penalized them directly.
Although the Penguin 3.0 release was at first minimally communicated by Google, it was confirmed by the company 24 hours after the release.
Google’s Pierre Far posted to his Google Plus Page, “On Friday last week, we started rolling out a Penguin refresh affecting fewer than 1% of queries in US English search results. This refresh helps sites that have already cleaned up the webspam signals discovered in the previous Penguin iteration and demotes sites with newly-discovered spam.
It’s a slow worldwide rollout, so you may notice it settling down over the next few weeks.”
Because the roll-out will take a few weeks, it may be hard to analyze if a website was impacted and to nail down the issue to Penguin or another algorithm if a website has lost rankings. Also if disavowing bad backlinks was done to a site within the last three weeks, the effort won’t change ranking results as the updates won’t be included in the update.
If you want to know if your website was effected by the latest Penguin 3.0 update, contact DoubleDome Digital Marketing for a complimentary website review.
