We have some flippin good news Google announced on Friday that Penguin is now a part of their core search algorithm with real time updates (as opposed to the previous twice-yearly update cycle). This is one of the most important updates to happen in the last three years.

What is Penguin?

When looking at a way to determine what a quality link is, Google released an update to their algorithm codenamed ‘Penguin’. This was first launched in 2012 with the objective of reducing the trust that Google has in sites that have cheated by creating unnatural backlinks in order to gain an advantage in the Google results, as well as cutting spammy auto-generated sites from the index.

In practical terms, this means that if the Penguin algorithm determines that a large number of the links to your site are untrustworthy, then this reduces Google’s trust in your site. As such, the whole site will see a reduction in rankings, or even exclusion from the index.

What are the benefits?

– Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. Once a webmaster considerably improved their site and its presence on the internet, many of Google’s algorithms would take that into consideration very fast, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed. With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after they recrawl and reindex a page. It also means Google are not going to comment on future refreshes.

– Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.

Good links are vital and should be viewed as you would view all your traditional relationships with users offline (read how to avoid bad links here). If you’re looking to improve your marketing strategy, have a look at SEO services to see what we can do for you!

It is important to note that good marketing isn’t just limited to good links, you should always seek to embody good marketing (both traditional and digital) across the whole board. Are you hitting a marketing brick wall when it comes your strategy? Check out our newly launched GIANT campus to see how we can help!