Google’s spam fighting algorithm, Penguin was formally launched in April of 2012.

A step up from the Brandy algorithm, which was Google’s first attempt of considering anchor text relevance and link neighborhoods in assessing a site’s quality which was rolled out on February of 2004. The penguin was Google’s way of keeping webspam in check, impacting 3% of English queries on its first launch. Penguin’s objective was to punish websites that gained rankings through crooked link building schemes, paid links and other devious ways of gaining rankings! But, no website is too late for redemption. Google also launched the link disavow tool, a tool that provided webmasters a way of appealing to Google telling them that they have learned the error of their ways and will not do wrong by them in the future. It was also a way for websites that were wrongfully accused to be released from their penalties- it was a work in progress.

As the ‘Webspam task force’ goes through the entire world index of following links, it collects data from all the websites in the web to find trends on how it can improve itself. This is commonly known as a data refresh, and after the algorithm refreshes, there’s usually an update after it. There have been a lot of major algorithm changes for the penguin, and the latest update (Penguin 4.0) generated a huge buzz within the community with reports of it being rolled out at the end of 2015, has officially been announced to be rolling out on 2016. This has had various SEO companies capitalizing on preemptively cleaning their backlink portfolio for good measure to be sure that their rankings are secured towards the launch of the new beefed up Penguin 4.0.

Other players in the industry have a good sense of penguin’s new upgrade and what it will be looking for on its next patrol route by looking at big data and by monitoring SERP (Search Engine Results Page) activity. To see how far the penguin has come, here’s a timeline of its update history:

Knowing where penguin came from, do you have an idea of how Penguin 4.0 will behave? What will be the meta game for the community?

 

 

Article By: Pao Durias