by samIn their continual efforts to improve the relevance and usefulness of search results, Google is always evolving its search engine algorithms. These changes aim to weed out results that are irrelevant to search terms, are poor quality, or do not contain the relevant information being looked for by the searcher. Digital marketing experts need to keep a keen eye on these changes as they directly affect SEO efforts undertaken to promote website visibility and click-through rates.
The previous update, branded under the cute and cuddly name of Panda (and Google engineer Ravneet Panda), targeted lowering the search rank of “low-quality sites” and “thin sites,” therefore promoting higher-quality sites at the top of search rankings. Using artificial intelligence in a far more intuitive way than previous Google algorithms, Panda mapped human tester ratings of site quality to build an artificial understanding of the common indicators of poor websites. Panda differentiated from previous updates in that it analysed the entire site as opposed to single pages being ranked.
Google’s newest algorithm update, codenamed Penguin, was released (in its first version) on the 24th of April 2012, affecting 3.1% of English searches, and differs from Panda in several ways. Whilst Panda concerned itself with the quality of a website’s user experience, Penguin primarily focuses on diminishing rankings of websites violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. As such, this update is more heavily aimed at sites that have been abusing the functionality of Google’s search engine to push their website’s rankings up with poor-quality SEO efforts. These SEO tactics are often called ‘black hat’ and include keyword-stuffing, cloaking, and collecting links from unrelated sites and link farms.
The newest data refresh from Google (the third Penguin) came about as of the 5th of October and is said to affect only 0.3% of search queries, as initially announced by Google’s Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) on Twitter.
How does Penguin affect you?
If you’re already conducting a clean SEO campaign in concordance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you should be unaffected by Penguin. However, you must be careful that your site is not sending out the wrong signals to Google’s crawlers. If your site looks like it’s employing black-hat SEO tactics, Penguin could punish you by lowering your search rankings.