Can Penguin 3.0 Fly or Just Waddle Around?

How Penguin 3.0 May Have Affected Your Website Rankings

A bit of background history of this highly discussed Penguin search engine platform: Search engines use algorithms to determine how to rank, and whether to penalize sites and pages. Search engines are always in hot pursuit in their quest to improve the user experience, by rolling out continual updates to their algorithms. Their updates work to reward sites that fulfill the searcher expectations, and work for the deletion of spam that are used to manipulate rankings within the web community. The Penguin update series targets “spammy” anchor text on inbound links. With the release of Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014, Google has kept us more in the dark on this update than usual. We have been anticipating this major update, since it's been the only Penguin update in over a year.

 Google Penguin Updates

When gauging how large an update was and how much of the webmaster community was affected, Google tells us how significant it was by measuring the percentage of queries impacted.

• Penguin 1.0 impacted 3.1% of queries, 1.1 was 0.1% and 1.2 was 0.3% of queries
• Penguin 2.0 was 2.3% of queries and 2.1 was about 1%
• Penguin 3.0, which some may argue is 2.2 and not 3.0, impacted less than 1% of queries. Now, it may be higher in other languages, but Google’s measurement were in English queries

We have learned from Google's Pierre Far, that the roll out is far from complete. Penguin 3.0 is still rolling out, and will continue to do so for the next few weeks. Pierre had said, "It’s a slow worldwide rollout, so you may notice it settling down over the next few weeks."

Some experts perceive that Penguin 3.0 is more like a refresher than an actual search engine update. Many search engine experts are expecting to see continual Penguin refreshes, much like the monthly Panda updates we’ve seen over this year. In the meantime, others speculate that another Penguin update with more impact may be coming. SEOs are hopeful future updates will be more beneficial in fixing negative SEO’s feedback, which is reportedly untouched with the recent update.

How Significant Is Google Penguin 3.0?

Bottom line: It’s still too soon to tell what the future may hold for Penguin 3.0 and its related updates. Links still matter to searchers, and the superb quality of those links is important. It is advised to closely monitor you website analytics over the next few weeks for any drops or sudden changes in rankings.

Do you think that Penguin 3.0 is a great update for you and your company or just another small refresher?  We would love to hear your story with Penguin in the comments below….