Google Pen­guin is a set of updates and data refresh­es to the Google core algo­rithm, known as ‘Hum­ming­bird’. Pen­guin, along with Google Pan­da, is one of the great­est core updates.

Google Pen­guin algo­rithm update was launched in April 2012 and has had sev­en major updates since. The final one, known as Pen­guin 4.0, has been released in Sep­tem­ber 2016. Google Pen­guin is now an inte­gral part of the Google core algorithm.

The purpose of the Google Penguin update

The pri­ma­ry goal is penal­iz­ing spam­my web­sites that were using manip­u­la­tive tech­niques to posi­tion them­selves high in search results. These web­sites achieved high posi­tions on SERP by vio­lat­ing Google Web­mas­ter Guide­lines. The offend­ers were most­ly using black hat SEO tech­niques, such as cre­ation of thou­sands of arti­fi­cial links point­ing to the same page. After the Pen­guin update, their posi­tions in search engine results suc­cess­ful­ly decreased.

The Pen­guin update affect­ed approx­i­mate­ly 3% of Eng­lish, Ger­man, Chi­nese and Ara­bic key­word queries at the time of deployment.

How Penguin initially worked

Ear­ly Pen­guin oper­at­ed on a peri­od­ic basis. It would scan the Inter­net, deter­mine the spam­my web­sites and penal­ize them. It would take a while until Pen­guin would res­can those web­sites and re-eval­u­ate them. The main flaw with Pen­guin peri­od­ic oper­a­tion was that web­sites hit by the algo­rithm stayed penal­ized until the next scan. Today, Pen­guin works in real-time. This means that the spam fil­ter penal­izes spam­my web­sites and releas­es fixed web­sites momentarily.

The current state of Penguin

Pen­guin, as of its sev­enth iter­a­tion, has become more pre­cise and dis­crim­i­nat­ing. While in the past Pen­guin would penal­ize the entire web­site, it is now much more pre­cise. Accord­ing to the offi­cial state­ment from Google:

Pen­guin is now more gran­u­lar. Pen­guin now deval­ues spam by adjust­ing rank­ing based on spam sig­nals, rather than affect­ing rank­ing of the whole site. It means it affects fin­er gran­u­lar­i­ty than sites. It does not mean it only affects pages.

The final ver­sion of Pen­guin is able to iso­late spe­cif­ic pages instead of penal­iz­ing the entire web­site. Also, there were exam­ples in the past of Google iso­lat­ing and demot­ing a sin­gle page on pop­u­lar web­sites such as Mozil­la and BBC. The rest of the web­site would not come under penalty.

How to remove Penguin penalties

The best meth­ods to remove a penal­ty are as follows:

• dis­avow bad links
• start build­ing high-qual­i­ty links

The per­cent­age of good links ver­sus bad links is the most impor­tant met­ric Pen­guin eval­u­ates. Increase the per­cent­age of good links and low­er the num­ber of spam­my links to restore your web­site and recov­er its rankings.

Future Penguin updates

Pen­guin update is now an inte­gral part of Google algo­rithm. There will be no more offi­cial state­ments about its updates.