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What You Need to Know about Google’s Penguin Algorithm Update

Announcement posted by ReachLocal Australia 15 Dec 2015

Google has announced that the next Penguin update will allow users to see some great site benefits. Sounds exciting – but what does this actually mean?

The Penguin algorithm will work in real time and we can expect to see improved site rankings (as well as penalties) when Google discovers good link building efforts or toxic links on a site.

Why is this Penguin Algorithm update exciting?

Firstly, how much do you already know about Penguin? In April 2012, Google updated their algorithm to catch out sites that were considered to be spamming search results. Google began to penalise websites it believed were guilty of buying unauthentic, backlinks through link farms. Sites that used poor backlinking practices with the intention of trying to fool search engines into boosting their overall rankings were in trouble.

When the Penguin update was released, sites that had a bad backlink profile or sites that received a penalty from Google needed to remove these links manually. Google also offered a disavow function through Google’s Webmaster Tools for site owners who requested the removal of toxic backlinks but had no luck in having the links removed.

A major issue webmasters and site owners had with the previous Penguin Algorithm update was the amount of time it took to impact rankings. If a site was penalised and all the required actions of cleaning up a backlink profile were followed, this clean-up would not influence rankings until the next Penguin update. Google went from October 2013 to October 2014 without updating Penguin. Websites impacted negatively from 2013 that actively worked on cleaning their profile did not see their good work acknowledged for a full year. Rankings remained lost.

When Google’s new penguins make an appearance in 2016, the search engine will remain in a state of continuous updating and analysing of site links – good or bad, and ranking changes should happen in real-time too. This means site owners and webmasters won’t have to wait months or even years, for Google to update the algorithm.