Penguin 4.0: what does it mean for your SEO?
At the end of last week Google finally rolled out it’s Google 4.0 algorithm update.
The links which point to a website dramatically affect the performance of a website in the organic search results. These links can have a positive and negative effect and Penguin will now be constantly evaluating backlink profiles within the main core algorithm.
What is Penguin?
Penguin is a filter designed to capture sites that are spamming Google’s search results in ways that Google’s regular spamming systems might not detect.
The last Penguin update, Penguin 3.0, happened in October, 2014. So any sites hit by it have waited nearly two years, those long delays are now to be a thing of the past, according to Google. With this latest release, Penguin becomes real-time.
As Google recrawls and reindexes pages, which happens constantly, those pages will be assessed by the Penguin filter. Pages will be caught and/or freed by Penguin as part of this regular process. With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page.
Factors such as ‘keyword stuffing’ and ‘link spamming’ are negatively penalised under Google’s algorithm updates. Google have always been clear that business owners should simply focus on producing a high-quality website with useful content that genuinely helps and guides those that use it, and then you’ll have no unnecessary run-ins with Google Penguin!
What do the experts think?
The experts believe that being realtime helps to set expectations as you won’t have to wait weeks or months for the next algorithm refresh to assess your link removals and sites should be awarded for great content, instantly.
Another great change with Penguin 4.0 is the fact that it has become more “granular”. This means that whatever penalties hit our sites from now on they will impact separate pages on the site and not the whole domain in general. This should be a positive thing as it will give users a better chance to fix those penalized pages and to learn from mistakes without losing a huge amount of our organic traffic.
Black hat techniques will slowly become obsolete and will eventually stop working which is the ultimate goal.
So what should you do moving forward?
Write well researched and useful content and build quality links to it. As well as targeting your audience via multiple channels; social media, paid search etc. The only way to stay on the safe side of Google is to carry out white hat SEO.
…Long story short, the update is more convenient, but essentially nothing has changed!
If you would like any further information then please give the Dental Design team a call on: 01202 677277.
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