Google uses over 200 signals to rank pages in search engine results. Penguin is a filter or collection of signals intended to remove spam from the rankings. Originally, Penguin ran at long intervals and applied to sites as a whole. If your site published what Google considered web spam, and was caught by the filter, it might mean a years-long penalty that affected the entire domain.
In September, Google announced that Penguin runs now runs in real time and its penalties can be applied with improved granularity.
Webspam is essentially any technique that attempts to trick Google into ranking content higher than it otherwise would. Google wants to rank high-quality content, and makes it fairly clear what it thinks counts as high-quality.
Web spammers want the benefits of high-quality content without doing the hard work of creating it. Webspam techniques range from keyword stuffing to link schemes, all of which aim to bamboozle the algorithms. Penguin is intended to catch webspam that gets past the company’s other signals.
Getting penalized by Penguin was bad new for a publisher. Because Penguin was refreshed irregularly, a site could wait a long time before any Penguin penalties were removed. Before the most recent update, the interval was almost two years. Any site considered spammy by the 2014 refresh has been in the penalty box for years. Because the intervals were so arbitrary and the application of a Penguin penalty so potentially damaging, there was little incentive for publishers to immediately improve their site’s content.
Now that Penguin works in real time, penalties will be applied and lifted with much greater frequency. Spammers and shady SEOs can’t get a few months’ good traffic from a spammy site. Sites that are penalized can recover more quickly if they act to improve on-page content.
According to Google, Penguin updates will be applied immediately following recrawling and reindexing.
I think this is good news for users and for publishers. For users, it means less spam and better content. Webspam will be removed from search results more quickly, and spammers will have less incentive to create spammy sites in the first place — although, a lack of effectiveness hasn’t stopped black hats peddling their wares to unsuspecting customers thus far.
The other good news is that Penguin can work with greater granularity than the domain level. Google hasn’t been forthcoming about what exactly this means, but SEO experts expect Penguin can now apply penalties at the level of pages or groups of pages, which means that publishers with a historical spam problem stand to reap benefits for every improvement they make to their pages.
Lastly, there will be no more Penguin refresh announcements — because the changes happen in real time, announcing updates doesn’t make sense any more.
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