A Link Builder’s Perspective on Penguin 4.0

Google recently launched Penguin 4.0, an update to their current algorithm.  In case you are not sure what Penguin is exactly, we have the lowdown for you.  Penguin hunts for inorganic links posted to the world wide web.  Inorganic links are the ones that are bought or put there only in order to improve search rankings, whether or not they were of quality. These are considered bad links, and Google has had enough. 

These bad links became toxic to the internet, as their removal was quite a time-consuming process. The two main updates to Penguin are that it is now real-time and granular. Because Penguin data is refreshed in real-time, any changes are made as soon as the page where the bad link was is re-crawled and re-indexed. In addition to this, Penguin is devaluing spam by making ranking adjustments only on spam signals, rather than adjusting rankings on the entire website.

Cory Collins, a proficient link-builder, shares his perspective on Penguin 4.0.  He thinks that the fact that Penguin devalues links rather than the entire site is a good thing, as it will encourage marketers and site owners to have even stronger relationships with Google.  He says that now it will be harder than it was before to manipulate the system, so focusing on building good quality links will be essential. Devaluing links will be great for SEO because it will counter any negative SEO that takes place.

Cory mentions that Penguin used to to penalize entire websites for specific bad links, but that they should have never done this.  The spam should be punished, but not the entire site. This only made business owners, website owners, SEO, and marketers especially in Chiropractic SEO weary of Google, unsure of whether to trust them or not.  This ambiguity was only made worse by the recovery period.  There was uncertainty regarding whether or not websites were actually affected as well as wait times that could not be predicted as to how long they would take.

The only way to recover was from the time between data to refreshes, so lengthy time intervals would slow down the entire process.  The new change of eliminating devaluing of whole websites, and only devaluing links is what people have wanted from Penguin since it first came out.  Business owners, SEOs, and marketers are incredibly happy with this change.