SEO Update: Google Rolls Out Penguin 4.0 | Digital Recharge

In this episode of Digital Recharge, our SEO Technical director Bill Wilkinson discusses how things are progressing with the search engine giant’s latest Penguin algorithm update – what it is, what we’re seeing and what you need to know in regards to SEO strategy pivots.

As you’ve hopefully heard by now, Google pushed out a real-time Penguin update a few weeks ago. For those of you who are new to digital, Google’s Penguin algorithm looks at backlinks and penalizes pages and sites with spammy backlinks. Watch the short video below to get the low-down on how the roll out of Penguin 4.0 may affect your site’s organic traffic rankings!

Top Takeaways about Google’s Latest Penguin Update:

• Penguin 4.0 is in real-time, which means that it processes every single time Google crawls your site, whereas before the updates were released on scheduled dates.
• If you are affected you can recover much quicker – this is good news, as you no longer have to wait until the release of the next update to see improvements
• You need to be more diligent in monitoring your link profile – Due to this update being in real-time, you’ll need to keep a much closer eye on your link profile to ensure you won’t be affected byt the alogirthm update.
• This update won’t tank your whole site – Penguin is now much more granular than it was before -rather than penalizing an entire site, only specific segments of your site that violate Google’s guidelines will be affected in terms of ranking loss and traffic.
• It is harder to determine if your site was affected – This version of Penguin does not “penalize” your site in the way that previous versions would, rather it devalues any links that do not adhere to Google’s guidelines. Many sites are seeing dips – links that were previously counting for their rankings that are no longer passing that authority to their site.
• This update is currently only integrated into Google’s core algorithm for desktop – we are not seeing the same fluctuations on mobile searches. Reason for this is that Google’s desktop and mobile algorithms are completely separate, which is an indicator that they are testing this on desktop first and will release it later on mobile search.

Thanks For Plugging In!

We hope this helps you out! Keep an eye out for our next episode of Power Digital’s Digital Recharge, where we update you on the latest news and trends in the digital marketing world. We’ll be back with more very soon, but if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]!