“Good website practice and optimizing for conversion usually makes for good search engine optimization. These work together to ensure you drive quality traffic and can persuade that traffic to help you meet your business goals.” (Marc Ostrofsky)
WHAT IS GOOGLE PENGUIN?
Google Penguin filter is the algorithm by which Google creates its search results. It takes into account the number of ads in a particular website and the content relevancy of the webpage. Trustworthy and renowned websites usually don’t face the wrath of the Penguin. However, fresh websites having low traffic are usually targeted.
UPDATE TO GOOGLE PENGUIN
Google has finally unveiled an update to its Penguin Filter which allows it to target less beneficial spammy sites and remove them from the search results. The update has resulted in many sites getting de-indexed; mostly spammy and irrelevant websites.
According to Google, the Penguin filter rollout was completed on October 20th and sites have begun noticing changes in traffic; be it a positive change or a negative one.
IMPACT ON SEARCH QUERIES
Google has stated that the new Penguin filter has impacted around 1% of search queries by now. Knowing Google we speculate that the Penguin filter will definitely throw some websites in the corner while raising the ranking of many others.
UPDATE VERSION
The Google Penguin Update is the sixth update in the Penguin filter and it has been released after a year. Since there was no release in the Search engine’s algorithm in the past entire year, we count this update a as a major release and an entire algorithm remap altogether. Even though Google has not yet assigned a version to the Penguin update, we have labeled this update as Google Penguin 3.0
CHANGES ON VARIOUS WEBSITES
The Penguin update was awaited by many site owners primarily because of the algorithm refresh because if you are struck by the Penguin Filter once, you have to wait till the next update in order to be sure whether the changes in your website are at par with Google’s policy.
Publishers who made changes, such as removing spammy websites and erroneous backlinks have definitely seen an improvement in their traffic after the update in the Penguin filter. However if your website didn’t see any improvement in traffic and you were hit by the Penguin last year, then it means that the changes in your website policy are not up to Google’s standards and more improvement is required.
According to Google, changes made three weeks earlier than the update are also discredited since it was too late. Many websites have seen a ranking drop in the past few days, however, it must be remembered that the Penguin filter discredited many websites not because the site was directly penalized by Google but because the bad links were de-indexed and that resulted in rating drop and site visibility decline.
FRESH UPDATES CAN BE EXPECTED
Also coupled to the update was the announcement of Google that they will begin fresh rollouts of Penguin on a regular basis. Let’s hope that is true since being hit by the Penguin is a vow many website owners have faced.
“A good website will not bring in customers but will make customers.” (Asila Paras)
Contact us for more information over this blog and a number of technical other blogs.
