Everything you need to know about Google Penguin

From public posts and articles from Google’s search engine and web spam teams, we know that there are around 200 signals as part of the core algorithm. Google has now announced that Penguin 2.0 is now part of that core algorithm and much its predecessor is focused entirely on cleaning up inbound links:

“After a period of development and testing, we are now rolling out an update to the Penguin algorithm in all languages.”

There are two important things to note about the update:

Real time – Penguin is now real-time. In previous updates, the changes made to the index were permanent until the next time it ran. This meant long penalties that could not be reversed even with reconsideration requests. Once the issues were fixed, the site needed to wait hundreds of days for the next Penguin refresh before it was removed. Now it happens in real-time, which means that any penalty can be recovered from faster.

More granular – Previously any penalties tended to affect the entire website. Now in Google’s own words “devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting the ranking of the whole site”. There is no specific detail to this but it might be safe to assume that the destination page will be penalized as opposed to the entire domain.

This is just one part of a new update to Google’s search engine algorithm, but it is safe to say that this will greatly improve the quality of the search results.