Is the penguin a trick or treat for your business?
A week before Halloween, Google announced that they have started rolling out the long awaited Penguin 3.0 algorithm, with a number of businesses reporting a mix bag of both positive and negative feedback in their search results.
Want to know what you should be on the lookout for? Here are the tell-tale signs for whether Penguin has given you a trick or a treat this Halloween.
What is a Penguin and what do you mean by an update?
Many of us know penguins as cuddly black and white birds that everyone wants to hug, but in the world of online marketing Penguins can put the fear into business and SEO professionals, as they hold the key to their website traffic.
The first version of Penguin was released in April 2012 and was designed to target sites that were using “spammy” techniques to game Google’s algorithm, thereby violating its quality guidelines. Penguin’s primary target was unnatural linking techniques, such as paying for links, over-optimising anchor text and penalising sites it detected were engaging in these underhand tactics.
The new algorithm was designed to create a better user experience for those searching online and push companies to create interesting and engaging content that people would link to naturally.
Industry view on Penguin
What the experts are tweeting about Penguin
Google Penguin 3.0 Is A Slow Worldwide Rollout – Weeks Not Days https://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-penguin-3-0-slow-worldwide-rollout-weeks-days.html … via @davenaylor
reports that Google Penguin shuffles are starting again bigger now
Summary
Here are things that you need to be aware of from this.
- The Penguin 3.0 started rolling out on Friday night, October 17th
- It will continue to roll out into November
- It’s a worldwide roll out
- Impacts less than 1% of English queries (but may have a smaller or greater impact in other languages)
- Remember that its only a refresh, no new signals have been added
- It’s a positive step and it helps sites recover from previous Penguin updates that have fixed their link profile
- It demotes sites that have a bad (spammy) link profile
