New Google Penguin 4.0 Uses Real Time Penguin Algorithm

Google Penguin 4.0 is part of the search engine’s core algorithm.

It’s been almost two years since Google last updated its Penguin algorithm.

That all changed this morning when they officially announced Google Penguin 4.0. Now part of Google’s core algorithm, Penguin will operate in real time and as a result be Google’s last confirmed Penguin update.

Real Time Penguin 4.0

Gone are the days being caught by Google and having to wait months or years to be free of the search engine’s wrath. Google will now crawl and index websites in real time, meaning that once it recrawls and reindexes a webpage, they will instantly be reassessed by Penguin.

Before this update occurred, Google would crawl and index websites and penalize those who produced spam. Once a website realized this and made changes to improve their site, they would have to wait until the next Google Penguin update to be free of any penalties.

For example, if a website were caught shortly after the launch of Penguin 3.0 (the last Penguin update before today), they would have had to wait until the launch of Penguin 4.0 to be cleared by the Penguin algorithm.

With Google Penguin 4.0, updates will now happen in real time and changes will be visible a lot faster than previous updates.

Update is “More Granular”

According to its post announcing Google Penguin 4.0, the algorithm will now be “more granular”. This means that Penguin will now devalue spam by modifying ranking based on spam signals instead of impacting the ranking of the entire site.

Google’s explanation of being “more granular” wasn’t entirely clear, however it looks as though the update will impact sites page-by-page rather than effect the whole website. It appears that pages with spam (such as those that include bad links) will be the only affected parts as opposed to your entire site being impacted.

This isn’t entirely clear at the moment, though, and we expect Google to offer more clarity shortly.

Some links that Google consider as spam include links from pages with no content, duplicate content, scraped content and irrelevant pages with irrelevant keywords. It’s always a good idea to review Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, and you can use Google’s Disavow to identify some of these bad links and tell Google not to take them into account when they assess your website.

Are You Affected By Penguin 4.0?

Google announced that it is currently rolling out the new update, so it most likely isn’t 100% live yet. You might begin to see small changes sooner rather than later if you were affected by Penguin 3.0, especially if Google frequently visits your page. The update will probably take a couple of weeks to get fully rolling.

Additionally, the update will be rolled out to all countries and in all languages right from the get-go. Rather than place a restriction on the languages and locations of its launch, people from around the world will be able to see the changes immediately.

The Last Penguin Confirmation

Because Google Penguin 4.0 operates in real time, Google no longer has the need to confirm any future updates to Penguin. This also happened with the Panda updates when it too became part of the core algorithm of Google.

History of Google Penguin

Google Penguin first launched more than four years ago on April 24, 2012. There has since been seven updates, four of them being major ones. Here is a timeline of Google Penguin.

• Penguin 1.0 – April 24, 2012
• Penguin 1.1 – May 26, 2012
• Penguin 1.2 – October 5, 2012
• Penguin 2.0 – May 22, 2013
• Penguin 2.1 – October 4, 2013
• Penguin 3.0 – October 17, 2014
• Penguin 4.0 – September 23, 2016

If you’re looking to outrank your competition on Google but not quite sure how to do so (or know if it’s even attainable), check out our blog post on How To Tell If You Can Outrank Your Competition.

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