Wednesday 26 November 2014

Google’s Penguin Updates- A Restrictive Algorithm for Excessive Supported Websites!

With so many minds and businesses struggling to find out a way to Google’s top ranks, people have come up with unique SEO techniques. There is not even a sheer of uncertainty that these SEO techniques will lead you to better rank positions. But are you sure enough about it when you see the Google’s Panda and Penguin updates?

Google’s two biggest, most efficient and ever improving Panda and Penguin updates have certainly affected many results online i.e. online ranking of many websites have been severely changed due to the effectiveness of Panda and Penguin updates.

Google Panda, with its first release dated back on February 2011, has played a significant role when it comes to refining out the ‘low quality sites’ from ‘high quality sites’. Till this time, people thought to be more intelligent to stand against Panda updates by creating backlinks that would really help them in climbing the ranks on search engines. This would again give the users not the accurate result but the sites which were high on ‘black hat SEO techniques’.

In this context, to offer more accurate and best websites to the people searching online, Google again came up with another algorithm that is known as Google Penguin update.

Google Penguin was first announced on April 24,’2012 with the aim at decreasing the ranks of websites that does not follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. With this more updated and advanced algorithm, Google assured that all the websites that have increased the rankings artificially or have manipulated the links pointing to the website goes down on search results. Google confirms that approximately 3.1 % of search queries in English get affected after the first Penguin update.

Till date, Google has rolled out six updates named as:

  •          Penguin 1.0 on April 24,’2012 (impacting 3.1 % of queries)
  •          Penguin 1.1 on May 26,’2012 (impacting less than 0.1 % queries)
  •          Penguin 1.2 on October 5,’2012 (impacting 0.3 % of queries)
  •          Penguin 2.0 on May 22,’2013 (impacting 2.3 % of queries)
  •          Penguin 2.1 on October 4,’2013 (impacting around 1 % of queries)
  •          Penguin 3.0 on October 17,’2014 (impacting around 1 % of queries)

Latest among all Penguin updates was the one released on Oct 17,’2014 with the name Penguin 3.0. Interestingly, on Nov 4,’2014, John Muller from Google confirmed that the roll out is still happening. John Muller states,
“As far as I know, the whole data is still rolling out slowly”.

With so many updates in past time period, it is more like hard nut to crack when it comes to make your website Penguin update compliant. Moreover, the central idea that comes out from all these previous updates is that Google has strictly gone by its algorithm to penalize websites that use manipulative techniques to achieve high ranks.

But primarily, to make your website Penguin update compliant, first it is necessary to know that whether you are actually ‘Penguin Hit’ or not. Do the research and find out if you see the major drop in the ranking, then probably you are hit by Penguin.

Once you are sure about you being hit by Penguin, then the only solution to this is to remove the spam, if any. There are probable chances that you might have received some messages in Google’s Webmaster Central regarding your previous spam activity. In case, you do not find any message from Google, but still sure of being hit by Penguin, then just identify what all can be spam like for Google and then remove it followed by filing a request of reconsideration.