The much awaited Penguin update was rolled out last week and webmasters are hoping that they will either recover from the penalty or lose ranking, if have even deviated slightly from the Penguin rules.
It’s not just us who are surprised by the not-so-bitter impact that Penguin 3.0 has brought, the entire web world is making speculations about the update that has taken more than a year to create. All the guess work related to Penguin seems right now.
Google’s Pierre Far has now shared more information about the Penguin 3.0, which gives an idea of how much damage it can cause to your website. Earlier, the search giant shared small snippets of information, of which the most important was that it was being held back out of sight, until now.
Pierre Far has revealed that Penguin 3.0 has impacted less than 1% of queries in the US English search results. He explained that the release has two focus areas:
- Allow the sites that were affected in October 2013 to recover. But, only those who have taken action against the spam
- To capture and dampen the rankings of website who have spam and somehow escaped the previous action
While we expected to see a massive change in the rankings across various marketplaces, Pierre Far put an end to speculations saying “It’s a slow worldwide rollout, so you may notice it settling down over the next few weeks”.
What Differentiates a Refresh from an Update?
A refresh doesn’t add any new signals to the algorithm but update does that. When Google releases a refresh, it is targeting at demoting the websites that have been engaged in spammy activities since last algorithm refresh. Also, it is helping sites that have worked on the spam issues post last refresh in improving their rankings.
Since, Penguin 3.0 is a slow rollout, we will not have data about the full impact for quite a while yet. So, if you haven’t been impacted yet, don’t be too relieved. Or if you were hit by last Penguin and haven’t been lucky yet, you might be in sometime.
Here’s a Quick Penguin 3.0 Recap:
- Began rolling out on Friday, October 17th
- Affecting less than 1% of US English queries at present
- Worldwide rollout that may last several weeks
- No full impact data can be collected, unless complete rollout is done
- It is a refresh and not a full fledged update
- No new signals added
- Aims at helping websites that fought spam issues after being hit last year and also demoting newly-discovered spammy sites