Penguin 3.0 – What Does It Mean For Your Website?

Google has finally rolled out the latest update to its infamous Penguin algorithm after over a year of stagnation.

Given that it’s been a while since the last Penguin update, it deserves a refresher. Google has a plethora of algorithms that modify the results pages to fight spam, black hat SEOs, and low-quality content. The Penguin algorithm specifically was designed to punish websites with spammy backlink profiles. Typically, this has been websites with hundreds or thousands of external links from the same C blocks (the third set of numbers in an IP address) or from numerous low-quality sites.

Whenever a Google update is announced, there’s a lot of anxiety from webmasters and SEOs, since any change to the Google rankings can mean a lot of headaches for them. The question on our minds is, what does the new Penguin update mean for my site?

In all likelihood, the answer is “nothing at all”.

Initial reports are that this update is a refresh, which likely means it’s primarily focused on repairing the reputations of sites that were punished by last year’s Penguin update. If your site wasn’t harmed then, there’s little reason to think it will be affected now, particularly as Google has stated that this update will only affect 1% of English search queries.

A better question to ask might be, how can we be confident that future Penguin updates won’t punish our sites?

As stated previously, Penguin is focused on punishing websites with spammy backlink profiles. If you’re not paying for links (and never have), creating blogs or other websites specifically to link to yours, or receiving links from a multitude of spammy sites, you have little to worry about. Google Webmaster Tools has a backlink checker that will provide you with a list of all the links to your site that Google can see – as long as you check this quarterly (or monthly if you’re the paranoid type) and disavow any links that could put up Googlebot’s red flags, you can consider yourself well-protected by the bite of the Penguin.