Google Penguin — that’s the subject of this lesson. What is Google Penguin and how does it work? What are its main updates and how did they show up in the search results and in SEO strategies? Does Google Penguin still matter today? And what do you do if you find you’ve been hit by a Penguin penalty?
That, and more, is what this lesson covers.
As you’ll know, in our SEO Academy we cover every topic connected to search engine rankings. If you’re new here, have a look at the earlier lessons — we’ve covered a number of things that will help you follow this article.
If this lesson interests you, it’s probably because you want a better grasp of what Google Penguin is and how it works, so as to make your SEO campaigns more effective.
Let’s not waste any more time — here we go!
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What is Google Penguin?
Google Penguin is the official name of an important update to Google’s general algorithm, Hummingbird. Before the Mountain View company gave it that name, though, Google’s Danny Sullivan — and much of the industry with him — referred to it as the webspam algorithm update.
Since 2012 Google Penguin has gone through 10 documented refreshes and minor or major updates, before being folded into Hummingbird in 2017.
When did it arrive, and why?
The algorithm’s first release is dated 24 April 2012, and it was trailed a few weeks earlier in a tweet from the head of Google’s webspam team, Matt Cutts.
The official announcement came shortly afterwards in two posts: one on Google Inside Search and the other on Google Webmaster Central.
As the original name suggests, the algorithm was built to keep content farms and spam sites — and in general sites that didn’t follow Google’s guidelines — out of the top of the search results (SERPs).
Largely thanks to grey and black hat SEO tactics, low-quality sites, portals and news aggregators had been able to climb the SERPs with spam content, often at the expense of quality sites.
In fighting the growth and spread of spam sites and content while rewarding quality ones, Google Penguin follows in the wake of another algorithm Big G released the year before: Google Panda.
What does Google Penguin do?
The algorithm acts as an anti-spam filter, helping Hummingbird sift the more than 100 billion pages in its index. The aim remains serving users content that’s relevant to a specific search query. To help do that, Penguin mainly looks for content it believes has used the following two black hat webspam tactics, and cancels their effect:
- Link spam (or webspam) and the manipulation of link schemes
“Link schemes” means the set of black hat link building practices aimed at manipulating PageRank and search engine rankings by artificially inflating a site’s “popularity” and “authority”. One of these is link spam: improving rankings by increasing the number of unnatural backlinks (out-of-context links pointing at a site) coming from low-quality or penalized sites. Links can be acquired not only through link building tactics such as guest posting, article marketing and excessive link exchange, but also by buying them from sites, site networks and link brokers — equally penalized by Penguin.
- Keyword stuffing
This is an SEO tactic that repeats a specific keyword or long-tail keyword over and over in the text in order to improve its ranking.
If Google Penguin finds content or sites it considers spam, it demotes their position in the SERP.
Image from stramark.nl
Google Penguin & SEO
A few months after release, by Google’s own estimates, the algorithm affected 3.1% of queries.
What changed for marketers and SEOs was that after Penguin, a large volume of links no longer earned a page a high quality score. Link spam and keyword over-optimization instead led to a downgrade of the entire site.
Google itself provides guidance on how to avoid a Penguin penalty and produce quality content. Here’s some of it:
- avoid repeating keywords excessively in your content (keyword stuffing);
- avoid manipulating link schemes — using programs or services to build links to your site, or exchanging links with keyword-stuffed anchor text;
- avoid cloaking (find out more) — showing users and bots different, more heavily optimized content by way of particular scripts;
- avoid putting hidden text and links on the site in order to manipulate rankings. There are various ways of doing this; among the most common are white text on a white background, text placed behind an image, CSS used to position text off screen, font size set to 0, and a link hidden in a tiny character such as a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph;
- avoid creating doorway pages (find out more) — pages or sites built around specific keywords purely to climb the SERPs;
- use white hat SEO tactics such as improving page speed, content of at least 2,000 words and proper keyword research;
- follow Google’s webmaster guidelines.
In the refreshes and core updates that followed, the algorithm steadily improved at detecting spam sites and violations of Google’s guidelines. The fact that spam and black hat link building tactics are now detected in real time makes it hard for marketers and SEOs to get past its controls, and forces the adoption of new tactics and SEO strategies.
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How to recover from a Google Penguin penalty
Google Penguin, along with Google Panda, is considered among the most treacherous penalties to recover from once you’ve been hit. Here are some of the most widely used and recommended tactics and practices for recovering from a Google Penguin penalty:
- make sure you really have been hit by a penalty; common symptoms are:
- reduced organic traffic
- loss of visibility for some or all of your keywords
- some pages disappearing from the search results
- the domain being de-indexed by the search engine
- run a link audit using a tool such as Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs or other software, to identify the inbound links you were flagged and penalized for
- carefully remove every unnatural link you control, by hand or with a disavow tool, and get those on third-party sites removed by contacting their webmasters
- disavow every spam link pointing at your site (follow Google’s guidelines on disavowing links)
- submit a reconsideration request through Google Search Console
As for ongoing practice, consider the following:
- use a periodic SEO audit to monitor the subdomains, pages and important sections of your site and spot any compromised content (more here), removing it as soon as it’s found;
- work continuously to prevent and remove user-generated spam (more here) on your site.
Image from stramark.nl
Google Penguin: updates and refreshes
Between 2012 and 2016, Google Penguin went through 10 confirmed refreshes and updates, minor and major, summarised here in chronological order, some with a short description of what changed:
Google Penguin 1.0, 24 April 2012 –> release.
Google Penguin 1.1 (#2), 25 May 2012 –> the first data refresh since release, affecting just under 0.1% of English-language queries.
Google Penguin 1.2 (#3), 5 October 2012 –> confirmed by Matt Cutts in a few tweets, this refresh affected roughly 0.3% of English-language queries, 0.4% of Spanish ones, 0.3% of Italian ones and an undeclared share of French ones.
More –> Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable
Image from Twitter.com
Google Penguin 2.0 (#4), 22 May 2013 –> a core update of the algorithm, for which Google spoke of new technology enabling more effective anti-spam action. According to Matt Cutts the update affected 2.3% of English-language queries, while the impact on other languages varied with the level of spam.
More –> Search Engine Land, Moz
Image from Twitter.com
Google Penguin 2.2 (#5), 4 October 2013 –> a data refresh rather than a significant update, with a fairly moderate impact on queries (around 1% of all searches), as Matt Cutts noted in a tweet.
More –> Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable
Image from Twitter.com
Penguin 3.0 (#5), 17 October 2014 –> a refresh whose global rollout took several weeks to complete and which, contrary to expectations, had a moderate impact (1% of English-language queries). Pierre Far confirmed it in a post on his Google+ profile, adding that the refresh helps sites previously hit by Penguin, and which have since cleaned up their backlink profile, recover positions in the SERP — while demoting those found to have a poor link profile.
More –> Search Engine Roundtable
Penguin Everflux, 10 December 2014 –> Google announces that Penguin, like Panda, becomes everflux. Optimizations will therefore run continuously, making the assessment of site quality faster. What’s more, a penalized site can recover by removing links manually or disavowing them.
More –> Search Engine Land
Penguin 3.1 Everflux (#6), 27 November 2014 –> can be considered part of the previous rollout (Penguin 3.0). This refresh specifically targets spam sites and those violating Google’s guidelines. Unlike before everflux, a penalized site no longer has to wait for the next release to see whether its changes worked.
Penguin 3.2 (#7), 2 December 2014 –> six months after Penguin 3.0 shipped, this refresh can also be considered part of that rollout. Its targets are sites using questionable link building practices and violating Google’s guidelines.
More –> Search Engine Land
Penguin 3.3 (#8), 5 December 2014 –> hard on the heels of the previous refresh, this one falls within the Penguin 3.0 rollout and targets sites classed as spam or found to have violated the guidelines.
Penguin 3.4 (#9), 6 December 2014 –> released the day after Penguin 3.3, this refresh targets sites violating Google’s guidelines on link handling.
Penguin 4.0 announcement (#10), 23 September 2016 –> two years after the previous Penguin release, Gary Illyes confirmed this major Penguin core update in a Twitter chat. Unusually, the full rollout was long and came in two phases (27 September and 6 October). Its initial impact was moderate, but crucially the algorithm is now part of Hummingbird and judges site quality in real time. What’s more, a previously hit site that has cleaned up its link profile no longer has to wait to see the effect.
More: Google, Search Engine Land, Moz
Image from Twitter.com
Penguin 4.0 phase 1 (#11), 27 September 2016 –> this first phase, a few days after release, is notable because unlike earlier versions the new Penguin may simply devalue links rather than penalizing the whole site.
Penguin 4.0 phase 2 (#12), 6 October 2016 –> this second phase is marked by a reversal of earlier Penguin penalties, which appears to follow the release of the new code and to complete within two weeks.
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered Google Penguin. You now have what you need to understand exactly what Google Penguin is and how it works, which updates mattered most over the years, and what they changed about the way SEO is done.
Search engines are constantly trying to improve their algorithms so as to serve users relevant, accurate results. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural matching, semantic SEO — these are just some of the recent arrivals that affect where content ranks, and we’ll keep covering where they lead in the lessons ahead.
Stay tuned and keep following us — in the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
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