The Penguin Update is a new algorithm used by Google to spot and filter out any spammers, it was initially announced on April 24th 2012. The main objective of this update is to come down on the ranking of all the sites which have indulged in spamming and dodgy link practices.
The sites which were involved in black hat activities were blocked as a result of this new update. This way, sites with legitimate content were given better value and rankings in the SERP’s.
There is some ‘preface’ that you must be aware off to fully understand the penguin update. Understanding this ‘preface’ will give you a better understanding about what the Penguin update does and why it is so important.
The Main Reason for the Launch of the Penguin Update
Due to digitalisation, we are living in an ever changing world. Traditional marketing practises are not proving to be as effective as before as the target audience now spend a greater amount of their time online with their laptops, mobiles and tablets. This has created a new and more effective brand of marketing known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Brands have realised that they have to capitalise on this online audience by providing relevant and useful information to influence their brand image.
SEO is a complex process which strives to increase the online presence of a specific brand or business within its targeted audience.
SEO: The Process
If you want to boost your online presence by doing SEO then it is important to only rely on the experts. It cannot be done by anyone, you need a professional who understands the complex algorithms of the search engines and can work with it to improve the online presence of your brand.
Ahem, just saying.
Spamming
With all the competition and digitalisation, almost all the brands utilise SEO. To elevate a business from its competition, SEO companies started spamming to facilitate faster results. Legitimate SEO is when you make multiple web pages which have all the relevant information on them. Spamming involves making many web pages just to target more keywords with irrelevant information on them.
Spamming has led to many ineffectual sites getting a good ranking on search engines over sites with more unique and relevant content.
Penguin: The Guardian
Google responded to the spammers and created a complex algorithm which acts as a filter to spot these spammers and block them.
Penguin is focused on quality data. It made sure that all the data that went through its survey during the crawl was checked completely and in real time. The authenticity of the information possessed by the data is then checked and the spammed pages are filtered out.
The sites which were heavily involved in spamming get punished by the penguin update. Even if they change their SEO techniques, they will not be allowed to rise on the search engine until the next crawl is done. This may have been done within few weeks or maybe a few months. There was no way to tell.
The new real time Google Penguin now not only affects the whole site but also has an impact on all levels like domain, folders, pages and probably also keywords and keyword groups. So anything that goes into the organic rankings will now be benefit by the Penguin algorithm to a greater extent.
This will aid Google in maintaining the quality of data on its search engine, facilitating its users with relevant information and aiding SEO practitioners who practice organic methods to boost rankings.