Winter is coming: Google rolls out Penguin 4.0

Google has announced another algorithm update. Penguin 4.0 is its fourth release and will be real-time and granular.

Pranita Tamang
1 MIN|September 26, 2016
Google Penguin 4.0 update

As Summer finally draws to a close and it starts getting a little colder, it seems Google may be starting to feel the chill. After almost 2 years, the company are rolling out another Penguin update to further boost search results.

This is the fourth update for the algorithm, and Google Penguin 4.0 will be ‘real time’.

First released back in 2012, Penguin was designed to catch and penalize any sites that were considered ‘spammy’ – in other words, any sites that may bulk buy their links to try and improve their Google rankings. Sites found on the wrong side of this categorisation may be suffering from the ‘blow’ for 2 years.

This latest release of Google Penguin 4.0 will be real time; Google will crawl and reindex pages constantly, meaning that pages will be caught up or freed on a regular basis. In the latest blog post, Google said:

“With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we re-crawl and re-index a page. It also means we’re not going to comment on future refreshes.”

Penguin 4.0 will also see Google become more page specific and granular. Rather than affecting the whole site, Google will adjust its rankings and penalties to specific pages on the site.

Furthering on from this announcement, Google said that as the updates are a constant process, it will no longer confirm future updates. They have not confirmed if Penguin 4.0 is fully live, but we suspect that it won’t be long until the updates are noticeable soon.

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