*** Read what’s new on the Penguin Algorithm as of 11/26/2015 here.
Over the weekend, Penguin 3.0 rolled out, confirmed according to numerous industry leading publications, and we are seeing proof of this from our rank tracking data collected over the past week. Since we manage tens of thousands of keywords across thousands of domains, we can see almost any trend in Google’s index.
Here’s a brief visual history.
Below you can see the history of the algorithm updates from from the last year from AlgoRoo.com by Dejan SEO.
Around a month ago, we started seeing Google de-index domains and pages, deeming them low quality. Once the URL index was assessed for quality, they were then able to look at site’s link portfolios in a new way – this is known as Penguin 3.0.
We’ve been anticipating this update for some time, as I mentioned in a post on the SEMRush.com blog. Google has been working on the update for 1 year, so there are a lot of different aspects to this algorithm update, covered in detail by Simon Penson.
The process of cleaning a link portfolio normally has a degree of what we call “restoration” (how far keyword rankings come back after cleanup is performed), based on the severity of the link “baggage” (bad backlinks in the link portfolio).
In this particular update, we’ve seen many site who lost business for a year actually regaining rankings and positions after cleaning the links, and Penguin 3.0 updating.
Improvements After Penguin Seen
This is just one example of what we’ve seen in a lot of areas of our rank tracking
Since the 2013 roll out of the last Penguin update we’ve been cleaning up link portfolios for new clients that were damaged by years of out of date link building methods performed by various SEOs. This Penguin 3.0 has been a friendly one so far for projects we’ve completed.
Wild Forum Reactions, Anger & Accusations
Immediately we went to twitter to see how things are shaping up in the webmaster world and found some mixed feedback. Could this be a sign that it hasn’t fully rolled out in the US?
Here are a few rumors that are spreading around the forums:
- Google is penalizing overly popular WordPress themes
- Reporting same results from previously ranked 301’ed sites
- One reported to have his home page replaced by inner pages on the SERPs
- Traditional blog commenting was targeted
- Some people are saying they only lost a few positions
- Some people are saying rankings are totally gone
There are a lot of discussions going on and speculations that this update hasn’t had it’s full effect just yet, and it’s more of a Google dance at this point. Here are a few more reactions taken to Twitter:
Analysed 42.315 keywords and traffic across 42 websites, of which 79% is US market, mostly brands. No significant difference. #penguinupdate
— Jan-Willem Bobbink (@jbobbink) October 19, 2014
! Google is really trying to mess with my work-life balance #penguin — Christoph C. Cemper (@cemper) October 19, 2014
Strange Data: What Google’s Penguin 3.0 looked like from 7 reporting stations around the world pic.twitter.com/eVJ93emc52 — Cyrus Shepard (@CyrusShepard) October 19, 2014
Penguin 3.0 Trends & Takeaways
There are a number of different things that the algorithm seems to focus on. It’s important that all link portfolio’s get checked for:
- Anchor diversification
- Link relevance & trust
- Deep link ratio
- Percentage of suspect links
- Brand mentions/shares
Link Clean Up Blogs & Education
We’ll be keeping everyone updated on Penguin 3.0 with updates on client intake, assessing link portfolios and what preemptive actions can be taken if you need help with ranking recovery.
If you’ve started to see ranking decreases since the Penguin 3.0 update a few days ago, let us demo our link clean up process. Follow our blog (links) for more updates and information on Penguin 3.0.
