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Google Penguin

See also:
• Google Panda
• Google Hummingbird
• Google RankBrain

What is Google Penguin?

Google Penguin Initial Release Date: April 24, 2012

Following on the heels of Panda, the Penguin update was announced by Google as a new effort to reward high-quality websites and diminish the search engine results page (SERP) presence of websites that engaged in manipulative link schemes and keyword stuffing.

The initial rollout of Penguin impacted 3.1% of English language search engine queries. Between 2012 and 2016, the filter went through 10 documented updates, evolving over time and influencing the SEO community’s understanding of the problematic practices Penguin sought to address. As of early 2017, Penguin is now part of Google’s core algorithm.

Triggers for Penguin

Penguin targeted two specific practices:

  • Link schemes - The development, acquisition or purchase of backlinks from low-quality or unrelated websites, creating an artificial picture of popularity and relevance in an attempt to manipulate Google into bestowing high rankings. For example, an insurance company in Tampa could fill Internet forums with spam comments linking to itself as “best insurance company in Tampa”, falsely inflating its appearance of relevance with these unnatural links. Or, the same company might pay to have links reading “best insurance company in Tampa” appear on an unrelated third-party article about dog grooming; content that has no relationship to the topic.

  • Keyword stuffing - Populating a webpage with large numbers of keywords or repetitions of keywords in an attempt to manipulate rank via the appearance of relevance to specific search phrases. For example, an unnatural repetition of keywords on a given page might look like:

“AAA Locksmith in Denver, CO is the locksmith in Denver that Denver residents trust when they need a Denver locksmith to quickly help them with their Denver locksmith needs.”

Or, the hypothetical locksmith in Denver might stick a large block of city names on one of his website’s pages, like:

We serve Denver, Thornton, Boulder, Lakewood, Arvada, Thornton, Henderson, Centennial, Morrison, Golden, Aurora, Lone Tree, Castle Pines, Roxborough, Aspen, Conifer, Eldorado Springs, Lafayette, Watkins, Altona, Longmont, Dacono, Ponderosa Park, Hudson, Coal Creek and Jamestown.     

How can I discover if I’ve been hit by Penguin?

First, it’s important to differentiate between Penguin and a manual penalty for unnatural linking. In brief, Penguin is a Google index filter applicable to all websites, whereas a manual penalty is specific to a single website that Google has determined to be spamming. These manual penalties may be the result of a given website being reported by Google users for spam, and it’s also speculated that Google may manually monitor some industries (like payday loan companies) more than others (like cupcake bakeries).

If your website’s analytics show a drop in rankings or traffic on a date associated with a Penguin update, then you may have been affected by this filter. Be sure you’ve ruled out expected traffic fluctuations from phenomena like seasonality (for instance, a Christmas tree farm in April), and carefully evaluate whether your keyword optimization or linking practices would be deemed spammy by Google, making your site vulnerable to an update like Penguin.

How to recover from Penguin

Unlike a manual link penalty, for which you must file a reconsideration request with Google once you’ve cleaned house, you do not file such a request to have a Penguin penalty lifted. Rather, taking action to remedy problems will often earn ‘forgiveness’ the next time Googlebot comes to crawl your site. These recovery steps include:

  • The removal of any unnatural links over which you have control, including links you’ve built yourself or have caused to be placed on 3rd party websites
  • The disavowal of spammy links that you can’t control
  • The revision of your website’s content to remedy over-optimization, ensuring that keywords have been implemented naturally instead of robotically, repetitively or nonsensically on pages where this is no relationship between the topic and the keywords being used

In sum, Penguin was created to remedy a severe weakness in Google’s system that enabled their algorithm to be ‘tricked’ by large numbers of low quality links and the keyword over-optimization of pages. To avoid having your website devalued by Google for spam practices, all content you publish should reflect natural language, and your link-earning-and-building practices must be deemed “safe.”

Other facts about the Penguin update

  • Penguin was initially launched as a separate “filter” through which search results were passed, but in September of 2016, Google announced that Penguin had become part of the core search engine ranking algorithm.
  • Google staffer John Mueller called Penguin a site-wide algorithm, meaning that the presence of a large number of low-quality links pointing to one page of your website could result in a reduction of Google’s trust in your entire website. However, some SEOs have asserted that by the iteration of Penguin 4.0, the filter may have softened a bit so that it is no longer penalizing entire domains.

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