Penguin Now Part of Google's Core Algorithm

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https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/09/penguin-is-now-part-of-our-core.html?m=1

  • Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. Once a webmaster considerably improved their site and its presence on the internet, many of Google's algorithms would take that into consideration very fast, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed. With this change, Penguin's data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we're not going to comment on future refreshes.
  • Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.
 
I can't see this being anything but a good thing. If we're forced to live in a world where the Penguin algo exists, these are the conditions I want.

Real time updates means I can fail faster and find out what is working and not working. Page level penalties / devaluations make it even easier to identify what exactly lead to a drop in rankings....and reverse it.
 
I'm excited about this because I think there will be some great opportunities to make some nice cash
 
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The page-level (so it seems) "granular" adjustments is interesting. On one hand it's what they need to create better search results. On the other hand it's going to let spammers test spam again with near real-time feedback. Whatever though, I trust Google has it under control and will get even more control over it as time comes. There's nearly zero competition out there at this point already.
 
For Penguin best practices..
  • All of your links shouldn’t include exact-match anchor text.
  • Vary your external links by brand, URL, long-tail keywords and non-descriptive keywords.
  • Try to maintain as much of a hierarchy as possible.
  • optimize your internal links
  • Link velocity (avoid sudden spikes and too many referring pages)
I suspect Google will try to push AMP and Rich cards to factor in in the near future.. thoughts?
 
It is good news, it will make it harder for the negative SEO crew too, the granularity that Google talks about will help here.

Real time will help, but what they mean is Crawl-time, so when they have recrawled your site, however there are plenty of easy ways to kick a re-crawl off.

I did a pre-emptive disavow on a few clients websites and we seem to have some nice movements this past few days, also an old site of mine which I knew had been hit by Penguin saw a huge spike in Page Views this past few days (glad I left Adsense on there now :-) )


Interesting times.
 
Every google update makes it harder on black hatters which is great for me and my clients. This one hasn't been much different tbh, mostly ++++ for PR style outreach and marketing. I don't grudge the black hatters one single cent they make though - since the first penguin came out their life has been harder. If they're still minting it, they're smart, and beating some seriously smart guys. God speed and may the solar winds be with them!
 
How are you guys and gals faring with this update?

My main white hat project has seen an 8% increase in organic traffic from this week over last week and in the past 30 days it's a 20% increase.

Meanwhile, I took a look at a spammer forum and they are posting stuff like this:

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I noticed their mods and administrators have come out of the woodwork to do damage control, claiming to be ranking for huge keywords with Scrapebox comments alone. So I take that to be the complete opposite and assume spammers are taking a beating (the Scrapebox, GSA SER, Spun Content kind).

How's this affecting you so far?
 
^ same thing happened with my spam project lol. Never doing that shit again, prob lost about $1000 in total
 
No negative affect on my site. My site is consistently increasing in organic but lately I've been doing a lot of link building, adding articles aimed at keywords, etc. Not sure if Penguin update gave it a boost. Possibly. Either way, things are moving in a positive direction so is all bueno.

I hear a lot about spamming techniques, scrapebox, blackhat, etc. What does that mean exactly? I know what spamming someones email is, hah. But don't really know what it entails when it comes to these guys building sites with spam/blackhat.
 
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Every update I've seen green. Same goes for this. Sweet!
 
Anyone seeing penalty recoveries?

I have a project I took on that was penalized algorithmically almost 2 years ago. I did the preliminary work to fill out the disavow. I found that some shit head had scraped a ton of sites in this vertical and was listing them across 100's of web 2.0's. I cleaned it up.

My fear was that when the penalty dropped I'd have a hard time knowing. It'd either move nowhere because the bad links were discounted (including the juice) but it recovered, or it would move down due to the juice being removed, but would be able to climb again. But it'd be hard to know in this second scenario because it could be the new Penguin hurting it even more.

What are you guys and gals experiencing?
 
@Ryuzaki - This is a new page I am tracking, I saw a ton of crazy shit for about 2 days, then they booted a few big players that were using spam and now I am slowly climbing.

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I must say I like it a lot, this latest update. It really is working fast as they've said. Cool.
 
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