In 2012, Google officially released the Google Penguin update (previously known as the web spam algorithm update) to diminish spammy link-building tactics. After the Google Panda update in 2011, it was another significant effort by Google to reward quality content and devalue the SERPs ranking of low-quality content. Google panda release in 2011 impacted almost 12% of the queries, while penguin updates impacted,

• 3.1% of the English queries
• 3% of the German, Chinese, and Arabic queries
• 5% of the polish language queries

Its impact varies from one language to other depending on the richness of spammy links in a particular language website.

Google Penguin Update

Google penguin update was the second significant initiative by Google to reward higher SERPs rankings for quality content. Google Penguin update key focus was on the following three elements,

• Unnatural link building – Backlinking was among the significant SEO signals before the Panda and Penguin update release. Scammers were purchasing links from irrelevant and low-authority sites to build the perception of fake popularity and dodge the Google ranking algorithm. In the end, it was hurting the quality of results on the top SERPs. The Penguin update was meant to identify and eliminate spammy links to filter the quality websites for the top SERPs.
• Unrealistic Link Growth – Penguin gets triggered if a website’s incoming links start growing at an unrealistic speed. After the penguin update, Google starts identifying and flagging such sites as spam.
• Keyword Stuffing – Keyword optimization is crucial in optimizing a webpage against specific keywords; however, artificially stuffing keywords comes under the black hat SEO practice. Penguin update improves the Google core algorithm capability to identify the web pages with artificial keyword stuffing to get them de-ranked.

Penguin has seen multiple updates until Penguin 4.0 release, which later became part of the Google core algorithm in 2016. This blog post will thoroughly discuss the Penguin update – Google’s second step in the series of quality checks.

How do I know If I’ve been penalized by the Penguin Update?

Since Penguin has been incorporated into the Google core algorithm with Penguin 4.0 release in 2016, it’s too complex to determine whether your website is penalized by Penguin.

Before the release of Penguin 4.0, it was manually working to filter the sites with spammy links. Google was penalizing the web pages manually by randomly analyzing links on a website or responding to the Google user complaint. At that time, it was easy to determine whether a website was penalized by the Penguin update.

After the Penguin incorporation into the Google core algorithm, you must analyze the traffic fluctuation pattern on your website analytics. If you find an unusual traffic drop on your site on a particular date when linking building is performed, then Google Penguin may have penalized it. It is a complex and time taking process. Still, you have to analyze all the links and keywords optimizations processes performed on a particular date to find the reason behind the Penguin penalty.

What to do if a website gets affected by the Penguin update?

Google’s Penguin filters send the warning of spammy links through the Google search console to the webmasters. But how to recover from the Penguin? What SEO experts and web admins can do to recover a Penguin-affected website. Web admins and SEOs can take the following steps to recover a site after Penguin effects,

• Removing all the incoming links over which web admins have control.
• You may not have control over all the incoming links, and it’s pretty natural. You can write to the websites for link-removing requests or use Google’s disavow tool to disavow unwanted incoming links.
• Revision of the content – revise all the web pages’ content to analyze the keyword optimization to identify and remove the artificially stuffed keywords.

Why does link cleanup not help in Penguin Recovery?

In particular cases, you may get frustrated with the link-cleaning process as it may not get the organic traffic back to normal. Then you may keep asking why link cleaning is not helping in Penguin recovery. It can be one of the enlisted reasons if your site traffic is not getting to normal as it was before the penguin penalty.

• Before the Penguin penalty, your website might be getting traffic because of the low-value or spammy backlinks. Expecting the same traffic volume after the Penguin recovery will be unjustified as your site does not have the spammy backlinks anymore.
• You might not have developed new backlinks after the link-cleaning process, causing a significant decrease in organic traffic.
• A website may not return to its normal after the Penguin recovery as All of the spammy links may not have been eliminated.
• A website may have a higher proportion of spammy/negative backlinks, causing a significant drop in organic traffic after Penguin’s recovery.
• There might be other issues, along with the spammy or low-valued backlinking problems, causing a significant drop in organic traffic even after the Penguin recovery.

These reasons are enough to comprehend that you may not expect your website to rank back to the same position after the Penguin recovery, particularly don’t expect instant results.

Before the Penguin recovery or penalty, your site may be getting traffic because of negative backlinks. However, it does not have the support of artificial linking after the penguin.

Google is continuously working on its ranking algorithms to ensure quality results for its users; its constantly evolving algorithms can be a reason behind the downfall in the ranking of your site. The ranking signals working for your site before the Penguin recovery may no longer be effective now.

Google crawlers keep crawling the sites to update SERP rankings. So, keep performing the link auditing, link building, and content analysis, and stay hopeful of getting ranked on the top SERPs.

Final Words | What is the Google Penguin Update?

The Penguin update was Google’s second most significant step after the Panda update to ensure quality results for users and reward quality content.

Penguin update was a blessing for the SEOs and web admins practicing legitimate White hat SEO tactics to boost their visibility. These two updates, later on, become part of the Google core algorithm to ensure quality results, discourage black hat SEO and reward the websites practicing white hat SEO.