First Google Penguin Update In Over A Year
It was confirmed on Friday that Google has updated it’s Penguin Filter which will target sites deemed spammy. If your sites are found in violation to Google’s linking guidelines there is a chance you will see a big decrease in your organic traffic.
Reports are coming in that some of the big sites out there have seen some changes late Friday night both good and bad. It’s possible this update could help your sites performance or hurt you. Unfortunately, it’s hard to verify the long term affect. Google Penguin update will release over time.
Sixth Release Of Penguin
Ok, so Google hasn’t given this update a name but Penguin Update 3.0 seems to be catching on. Here are the dates of all Penguin releases:
- Penguin 1.0 April 24, 2012
- Penguin 1.1 May 26, 2012
- Penguin 1.2 October 5, 2012
- Penguin 2.0 May 22, 2013
- Penguin 2.1 October 4, 2013
- Pengin 3.0 October 17, 2014
Who Stays In Jail Or Freed By Penguin
It may sound silly but it’s pretty serious if you own a website and rely on traffic. Many SEO professionals are anxious to see how this penguin will affect them. It can mean the difference between 5,000 organic traffic per month or 50,000.
The problem with releases like this one, if your hit by the changes you have to wait until the next update which could be months or more away. For example, lets say you removed spammy links after the October 2013 update. These people had to wait until now to see if their traffic has improved.
This has only been rolled out over the past couple days and it’s very hard to gauge. If you made changes last time around but still no improvement now you will have to wait for the next Penguin update.
Many people tried to fix links in the past few weeks. If your one of these people you were too late.
It’s also possible to see rankings drop but not actually be hit by Penguin. If a wide range of links are discounted they will no longer pass along the credit and act as “votes” like they did in the past.
Google considers these fake votes and sites should not gain in turn losing credit and potentially visibility. So it’s possible for this to happen even if they weren’t penalized by Google directly.
Something else you want to watch for. The new system supposedly will allow refreshes to happen more often. It’s tough to tell at this point. Time will tell and the count starts now.
So the Google Penguin update roll out is confirmed as of Monday morning and we will keep you posted as we hear more.
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