SEO – Google Real Time Penguin Update 2017

After a long span of 2 years Google has finally updated the Penguin and the latest version is 4.0 but sadly it is also going to be the last, with Penguins new real-time nature. When a new Update is released, the sites that removed bad links or removed spam may regain rankings. The company claims that it now runs in real time inside the core search algorithm.

Penguin is real-time now.

Penguin is a filter that is designed to catch the sites which are spamming the Google’s search results in such a way that Google’s regular systems might not be able to detect. It was introduced way back in 2012 and operated over a periodic basis.
In simpler words, Penguin filter runs and catches sites that are marked spammy. Those sites will continue to remain Penguin marked even if they improve or change until next time the filter runs, which can take months.

The last Penguin 3.0 was updated on October 17, 2014. The sites that were hit by 3.0 have waited nearly 2 years to get free. The The long delays are now just a past story, according to the company. With Penguin 4.0 release, it becomes real time. As Google re crawls and re indexes pages, which happens instantly, Penguin filter will have full access to those pages and they will be caught or freed by Penguin as part of its regular process.Google has also mentioned that Penguins data is refreshed in real time resulting in much faster visibility of changes.

Penguin now is more page-specific.

Penguin is more granular and now marks spam by adjusting rankings which are based on spam signals rather than affecting ranking of the entire site. Earlier, Penguin filter was a sitewide penalty.
Penguin can impact specific pages on a site, it can also impact sections, while the other pages are fine.

Is it fully live?

The real time Penguin update is probably not that much fully live yet. The company said it is “rolling out”. If Google regularly revisits your pages then you would see the change pretty soon. If Google comes to your site infrequently, it might take longer.

History of Penguin Updates.

Penguin 1.0 (April 24, 2012) impacting nearly 3.1% of queries
Penguin 1.1 (May 26, 2012) impacts less than 0.1%Penguin 1.2 (October 5, 2012) impacts nearly 0.3% of queries
Penguin 2.0 (May 22, 2013) impacts 2.3% of queries
Penguin 2.1 (Oct. 4, 2013) impacts around 1% of queries
Penguin 3.0 (October 17, 2014) impacts around 1% of queries
Penguin 4.0 (September 23, 2016)For Penguin 4.0, Google will not give the number of queries it impacted, rightly so because the updates are constantly happening in the background and the percentage will be changing constantly.

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