{"id":111307,"date":"2016-09-29T18:02:48","date_gmt":"2016-09-29T10:02:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/?p=11307"},"modified":"2021-05-11T05:55:40","modified_gmt":"2021-05-11T05:55:40","slug":"google-penguin-40-affects-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/google-penguin-40-affects-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"How Google Penguin 4.0 Affects SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The cat, or rather, the penguin is out of the bag. Penguin 4.0, which may well be the last Penguin by-version update by Google is rolling out and we’re already seeing the fluctuations in the search engine results pages. Here’s how Penguin 4.0 affects SEO long-term.<\/p>\n

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Google Penguin is now Real-Time<\/strong><\/p>\n

Always keep in mind that each link you build will now be automatically crawled, indexed and then (for a lack of a better word) ‘judged’ by Penguin.\u00a0For white-hat SEO people, Penguin updates aren’t really a bother<\/a>. In fact, it may well go ignored as if nothing happened – since the links we build are 100% legitimate. Panda and Penguin favors the white-hat SEO people<\/a>.<\/p>\n

However for the other colors of SEO, this may well be an exclamation mark. Your links getting ‘judged<\/em>‘ by Penguin real-time means real-time consequences. But on the other side of the spectrum, it also means that if you do get caught building bad\/spammy links by the algorithm, you can disavow them and get out of the penalty as quickly.<\/p>\n

Google Penguin is a bit more Harmless<\/strong><\/p>\n

Google’s Gary Illyes said that Google Penguin will\u00a0now only devalue bad\/spammy links instead of demoting a page or a website because of spammy\/bad links.<\/p>\n

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That’s good news for black and grey hat practitioners. Then again perhaps Google is having a hard time giving time and attention to all the disavow requests.<\/p>\n

Makes sense.<\/p>\n

It just eliminates a lot of the risk of building bad links though because the penalty is not really a penalty anymore but just a simple devaluation.<\/p>\n

Google Penguin will now Deal with Pages Individually as Well<\/strong><\/p>\n

If Google Penguin penalized an entire site because of the quality of its links before, it no longer works that way.<\/p>\n

“Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meaning Google Penguin will be able to go through each page of your website and ‘judge<\/em>‘ its links on a per-page level. I do believe, however, that your site’s ‘link reputation<\/em>‘ as a whole can still lift the ranking ability of all pages in your site.<\/p>\n

So this move of Google Penguin being more ‘granular’ simply means that Google is giving more weight to the individual links in individual pages in your site. I don’t believe this will be a big deal except for landing pages (mostly commercial landing pages) that are have a lot of low-quality links pointing at them.<\/p>\n

You see, it’s still common practice for SEO agencies and specialists to build landing pages that are peppered with keywords, with the exact-match title tag that the client wants, and then build lots of easy-to-get links to those pages.<\/p>\n

I think those types of landing pages are going to be the most affected out of this ‘granularization<\/em>‘.<\/p>\n

Disavow Tool is going to be Kept-Alive<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Google’s team for manual actions are still around even if Penguin is now real-time. So the disavow tool will be staying just in case. You can still use it if you see a stream of strange, negative links being built towards your site.<\/p>\n

Google Penguin 4.0 is not Spam Proof<\/strong><\/p>\n

That is, if Penguin is not a learning algorithm, black and gray hat practitioners may well be able to still keep testing where the end of the line is. After all, if Google Penguin 4.0 is not a learning algorithm, there must be an acceptable level of spam that can be tiptoed around, don’t you think so?<\/p>\n

Personally I would like the demotion\/penalization essence of Penguin to keep on so that the risk offsets the reward of using blackhat \/ greyhat SEO tactics. But who knows – perhaps there’s more there is than Google is letting on.<\/p>\n

Key Takeaways<\/strong><\/p>\n

As of now, Google Penguin 4.0 is still rolling out so it has yet to be seen how strongly it will affect SEO moving forward. How long the roll-out with be is speculated to be at 4-6 weeks from today. So if you’re seeing changes in your rankings, keep in mind that it may still fluctuate in the soon coming weeks before it stabilizes.<\/p>\n

Other Resources you may want to read:<\/strong><\/p>\n