What is Penguin 3.0?

The Penguin update targets sites deemed to be involved in spammy linking practices which violate Google Quality Guidelines.

Because of the way Penguin works, it has been a nightmare for advertisers because getting hit by Penguin means you have to make changes and wait until another update is released to see if your efforts have worked.

This is likely to get better as Google announced more frequent Penguin refreshes are likely to happen going forward.

If you worked on disavowing links in the last three weeks, you will have to wait until the next update to see any results. Search Engine Land explain this in an article from a talk Google gave at its SMX conference.

Here are dates of all Penguin releases from SEL:

  • Penguin 1.0 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
  • Penguin 1.1 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
  • Penguin 1.2 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
  • Penguin 2.0 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
  • Penguin 2.1 on Oct. 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)
  • Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014 (impact not yet released)



It is worth considering that if you do see a ranking drop that you may not have been hit by Penguin but the links pointing to you may have and therefore their links pointing could be devalued.

The update before this one was in October last year so I would expect this to be quite a big update affecting a good percentage of queries.

Have you seen any ranking movements because of Penguin 3.0? Do you have any questions?

Please feel free to comment below so we can discuss the ramifications of the latest link-based update.

Over and out.