14 DAY TRIAL // Since last Friday, Google has been rolling out its latest Penguin update, which the company announced a few weeks back. It seems, however, that there’s been a slight delay, more specifically a week.
“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,” Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, writes.
He mentions that this is a slow worldwide rollout, although given the fact that the update has already been out for the past few days, webmasters may have seen an impact already. The effects will be more noticeable in the next few weeks, however, Far says.
Penguin, as you may know, is the code name for the Google algorithm that seeks to decrease search engine rankings of websites that violate the Webmaster Guidelines the company has set in place. This happens by using artificial methods to increase the ranking of their web pages, which in short means they’re trying to manipulate Google.
A lot of work went into the latest Penguin update
The new update isn’t just a regular update with little changes, but rather a complete rewrite of the algorithm, one that Google has spent a year working on. Google promised that the new Penguin would make life easier for webmasters, while also promising that users would find it a “delight.” It’s doubtful that users would actually notice much since even Google’s biggest algorithm changes are too subtle to notice by anyone else other than the webmasters who have to face the traffic changes.
Once again, Google seems to be focusing on squashing down webspam, something that has been annoying them to no end. A lot of sites should get their names cleared after the last update, while others are going to be only now feeling the harsh effect of Google’s downgrading actions.
In recent months, Google has been updating many of its algorithms, most of which had sought to fight against spam and those who seek to artificially improve their ranking on the search engine. Not only has the company been hunting down individual sites, but it has also been taking down entire networks that were trying to trick the system, including by exchanging spammy links with one another.