So finally the much awaited Google penguin 3.0 has been released.
I am the using the phrase “much awaited” due to 2 reasons, 1st is Google has not released any penguin update since the last one year which by far the longest time Google had taken to release its new penguin update and 2nd is websites which were hit by penguin 2.1 have been waiting to get recovered with the new update.
Below are the released dates of penguin updates with impacting queries:
- Penguin 1.0 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
- Penguin 1.1 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
- Penguin 1.2 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
- Penguin 2.0 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
- Penguin 2.1 on Oct. 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)
- Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014 (impacting around 1% of queries)
How penguin 3.0 differ from Penguin 2.1?
Penguin 3.0 is just the refresh of penguin 2.1 which impact sites that have unnatural inbound links, low-quality inbound links, and dofollow blog comments.
According to Pierre far who works at Google UK mentions on his Google+ profile “On Friday last week, we started rolling out a Penguin refresh affecting less than 1% of queries in US English search results. This refresh helps sites that have already cleaned up the webspam signals discovered in the previous Penguin iteration, and demotes sites with newly-discovered spam. It’s a slow worldwide rollout, so you may notice it settling down over the next few weeks”.
That means no new spam signals has been added and penguin 3.0 update is just a refresh of its earlier version.
How Penguin differ from Panda?
Panda is an update for on-page content which means that panda update will blow the rankings of the websites which have unnecessary keyword stuffing, irrelevant content, content not matching the title tag, etc. on the other hand penguin updates will blow the rankings of the website which have unnatural and low quality backlinks.
How to find this bird of Google has affected you?
If you found severe rankings drop in the last few weeks, probably you have been hit by it. It has been released on 17th October and was officially declared by Google on 21st October. As it was mentioned earlier in this blog it has already impacted 1% of the English search queries and going to impact more. Also the mozcast tool of moz has showing hotter and stormier weather since 13th October which means Google has been changing its rankings. But it’s early to say whether it is because of Penguin 3.0 or not.
What to do in case it hit you?
Recovery is completely doable; however lots of work requires to be carried out to get to your previous rankings. A meticulous evaluation is required to be accomplished, bad (low-quality and spammy) links recognized, and after that those links are required to be disavowed or removed. Then wait for the next update and be hopeful.
I totally comprehend for some sites (especially big); carrying out this will be full of hassles as they have to evaluate thousands of backlinks. But unfortunately this is the only method to get recovered.
Conclusion:
If you want to remain unaffected from the all the present and future animal updates of Google, you are ought to create quality content which helps to provide you social high-quality inbound links and which gives your users a positive experience of your site. Stay away from black-hat SEO tactics, doorway pages, and don’t try to find loopholes in Google algorithms by violating Google’s webmaster guidelines. Just follow these simple rules and give a damn to Google animal updates.