What is Google Penguin?

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On April 24 2012, Google gave birth to a new algorithm update system named Google Penguin. The update’s purpose is to penalize websites that doesn’t respect Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, protecting the anti-spam policy. Briefly, Google Penguin sanctions any kind of tentative of hyper-optimization like the following:

    • The title meta-tag constructed by a series of key words, without necessarily being suggestive for visitors. Google Penguin firstly chooses the pages with short, concise and informative titles.
    • Textual content made exclusively for search engines without containing a pertinent information.
    • The pages saturated by advertising.
  • The excess of internal links or links to sites located on the same expression.
  • The excess of external links to sites with uncertain quality.
  • Voluntary creation of duplicate content.
  • The excess of site links coming from blogs or forums specifically optimized in order to artificially increase the site popularity, or press releases of average or poor quality.

Penguin affects an estimated 3.1% of the search queries in English and about 3% in Chinese, Arabic and German. However, the “highly spammed” languages have an even bigger percentage of affected queries.

Since its release on the market, Google has created for Penguin a series of new versions. Thus, on May 25 was revealed the 1.1 update. The aim of this update was to sanction the websites who try to get high rankings using manipulative techniques. Even if this version was designed to discover excessive spammers, it also managed to discover a few legitimate websites and SEOs which were using black-hat SEO techniques. On October 5, Google unveiled another new version of the algorithms, the 3rd one. This version only affected 0.3% of the sites. Recently, Google announced that an updated version named Penguin 2.0 is going to be released.

Compared with its previous ancestors, this algorithm update offers a few important changes. A big relief is that the new version only applies penalties to the web-pages which seem not to respect the Google Webmaster Guidelines, without existing the risk of affecting the entire site like Panda used to proceed. Another difference would be that Google Panda re-evaluate all sites once a month on average, which can be long time for a site that has quickly improved its matters. With Google Penguin, the optimization is continuously evaluated. If the aspects that do not meet the new demands are corrected in a short time, the penalties will be canceled immediately.

Cliff Lin

Cliff Lin

Internet Marketer
Cliff is an Internet Marketing guru with extensive experience in ecommerce and internet marketing roles. He has solid small business background, successful ecommerce experience, and internet marketing expertise. He is capable of implementing the latest interactive marketing tools for company, as well as backend information systems to maximize efficiency.