Google Announce Penguin 4.0 Update

The two key changes that Google officially announced were the following:

• Penguin data is refreshed in real-time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after a re-crawl and re-index of a page
• Penguin is now more granular and devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting the ranking of the whole site.

The real-time update will have a positive and negative impact on SEO. Websites have the opportunity to recover from penalties far quicker than with previous versions, but they can also be penalised just as quick.

What does this mean for websites that have received a penalty?

For websites that have been hit a penalty will understand the pain of submitting disavow files and removing the unwanted links, then having to wait for a considerable amount of time whilst the clean-up is done.

The new penguin update will mean that as soon as Google has identified any links to be removed, the penalty could be lifted straight away, meaning faster recovery time for websites.

How do you know if your website has been penalised?

If you’ve bit hit by a penalty, you would have noticed a significant drop in organic search traffic to your site, as well as a loss in rankings for key search terms.

Well maintained websites more often than not will have a few questionable links in their backlink profile, unknowingly engaging in ‘spammy’ activity, this leaving sites open to incurring a penalty.

To prevent this, we recommend that you take the following 4 steps:

1. Conduct an audit of your backlink profile and identify any ‘bad’ links, links that look of low quality and any deemed as ‘spammy’ need to be removed immediately.
2. Focusing on your remaining links, are they of higher quality, or do you need to build some higher quality links to your site, or particular sections.
3. Create a strong presence on your social media platforms by sharing the created links with your followers. A strong media following will help you build a strong SEO profile.
4. Create quality content for your site and have it distributed to sites that are relevant to your brand.

Have you completed a website SEO audit? Get in touch with one of Rubik Digitals SEO experts to understand more info@rubikdigital.co.uk