Google’s really getting some things right with Penguin 4.0 Real-Time. Learn why, and what it does, in this post. Did you know that it’s been more than 700 days since the last update to Google Penguin? At the time in 2012, the first Penguin update was earth-shattering event for SEOs and webmasters. Now, Penguin’s changes will come much faster and with practically no warning.
According to information from Search Engine Journal, Google says it will make Penguin changes in the same amount of time it takes to crawl and re-index a page. Depending on a number of factors, including the age of your domain, it could still take weeks or months for that to happen.
What we know now is that this process speeds up. You don’t have to wait for the next Penguin update to come out. The changes to your website’s rankings simply happen as your pages are crawled and indexed.
What Else Penguin 4.0 Changes
At this point, in addition to the faster changes to your rankings, Penguin 4.0 also:
- May not penalize your entire domain. It could. But now, it has more discretion to simply apply the penalty to the appropriate page or pages, instead of your whole website.
- May change how disavow works. At this point, this is still in debate. However, some SEOs, after talking with Google, believe Penguin 4.0 may not force you to go through the entire disavow process to regain your rankings if you have bad links, especially if they aren’t your fault. Marie Haynes published an excellent case study backing this claim up.
Penguin 4.0 = Time to Rejoice!
Moz noticed Penguin 4.0 “brought a lot of traffic to a lot of good websites and pushed a lot of sketchy links down.” Moz itself benefited from Penguin 4.0.
When you think about it, this addresses many of the issues SEOs have complained about for years.
Should you really have your whole site penalized because someone else is building bad links to you? That worked in the past. Now, it appears as though what are clearly spam links will count against you less and Google weights other factors more.
Should your whole website get penalized because you have junk links pointing to a few pages on your website? Maybe. It depends on your actions. If you built those links with the intention of manipulating your way up the search rankings, yes. If not, then no.
Why Not Make These Changes in the First Place?
Google’s had the most intelligent search algorithm on the planet for years. Why couldn’t they simply have updated it to do these things years ago?
You know, I just can’t tell you.
I guess from a business perspective, they didn’t care. Most searchers still wanted to use Google.
Sure, a few SEOs got pissed off. But why would Google concern themselves with such a small, disgruntled few?
They didn’t.
It’s just the search environment we live in. And I guess, let’s focus on the fact Google’s working on getting things right now, rather than being upset about what they didn’t do.
