Google Penguin Updates Penalises Manipulative Link Schemes & Keyword Stuffing.
Link volume (amount of inbound links) plays a significant role in determining a webpage’s score after it’s been crawled (cached) then indexed by Google.
As a result, many low quality websites, those with ‘thin’ content, but a high amount of incoming links appeared higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) than they should have.
While the Panda Update addressed penalising poor quality ‘spammy’ sites, it didn’t address the quality of inbound links coming from ‘paid’ link farms.
The Penguin Algorithm was introduced to reduce the effectiveness of a number of spamming techniques surrounding manipulative and ‘spammy’ links plus ‘keyword stuffing’.
It’s important to note, inbound links that are natural, authoritative and relevant are still valuable.
Google Penguin was launched on April 24th 2012 to penalise websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using what’s commonly referred to as ‘Black Hat’ search engine marketing (SEM) techniques that involve increasing the ranking of a webpage by artificially manipulating the number of links pointing to the page in order to receive more traffic and to also penalise websites that include in a webpage a large numbers of keywords or repetitions of keywords with the intent to manipulate PageRank with the appearance of relevance to specific search terms.
Officially, Google estimated Penguin affected approximately 3% of search queries in English, German, Chinese and Arabic, and an even greater percentage from ‘highly spammed’ languages including Russian.
To summarise, the Google Penguin Update was launched as a filter through which search results were passed to handle a severe weakness in Google’s search algorithm that enabled it to be ‘tricked’ by large numbers of low quality, typically ‘paid for’ links and the over-optimisation of webpages with an excessive amount of keywords (search terms).
Google Webmaster Guidelines section titled ‘Basic principals’ spells out what should be focused on and what should be avoided.
- “Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines”
- “Don’t deceive your users”
- “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings” and finally, perhaps most importantly
- “Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field”
These techniques should be avoided:
- Automatically generated content
- Participating in link schemes
- Creating pages with little or no original content
- Cloaking
- Sneaky redirects
- Hidden text or links
- Doorway pages
- Scraped content
- Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
- Creating pages with malicious behaviour, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other bad-ware
- Abusing structured data mark-up
- Sending automated queries to Google
As with the Google Panda Updates, the Google Penguin Update intends to reward good quality websites that provide a positive user experience with higher rankings in SERP, resulting in more traffic to a website.
Complete List & History Of All ‘Penguin Updates’
Penguin 1.1 (May 25, 2012)
Google rolled out its first targeted data update after the Penguin algorithm update. This confirmed that Penguin data was being processed outside of the main search index, much like how the Panda data was initially handled.
Penguin #3 (October 5, 2012)
After suggesting the next Penguin update would be significant, Google released a minor data update, impacting just ‘0.3% of search queries’. The numbering was also rebooted, similar to how Panda Updates were numbered.
Penguin 2.0 (May 22, 2013)
After months of speculation, the 4th Penguin update, officially named ‘2.0’ by Google was launched. The exact nature of the changes weren’t made clear and the impact wasn’t noticed.
Penguin 2.1 (October 4, 2013)
After almost 5 months, Google launched another update to Penguin. The 2.1 designation suggests a data update and not a major change to the algorithm. No fluctuations to SERP were noticed.
Penguin 3.0 (October 17, 2014)
After more than a year since the previous Penguin update, Google announced a ‘refresh’ to be spread out over the coming couple of weeks, which is typical.
Penguin Everflux (December 10, 2014)
Google said that ‘Penguin’ had shifted to continuous updates, moving away from infrequent, major updates, even though recent updates were very minor. This announcement also falls in line with Google saying they make daily updates to their algorithm.
Penguin 4.0 Announcement (September 23, 2016)
After almost 2 years of waiting, Google finally announced a major Penguin update. They suggested the new Penguin is now real-time and baked into the ‘core’ Google Algorithm. Initial impact assessments were small, but it was later revealed that the ‘4.0’ rollout was unusually long and multi-phase.
Penguin 4.0, Phase 1 (September 27, 2016)
The first phase of Penguin 4.0, was the rollout of the new, ‘softer’ Penguin Algorithm, which devalues bad links instead of penalising websites. In other words, bad links were not valued.
It’s worth mentioning here that Google makes changes to the Google Algorithm on a daily basis, often several times a day as it looks at and monitors the impact.
Read the official explanation of ‘What site owners should know about Google’s core updates‘ on Google Search Central Blog.
Posted Thursday, August 01, 2019 by Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search.
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Google Panda Update’s (2011 – 2015 )
Google Pigeon Update (AU-Dec 2014)
