How Google's Penguin update impacts SEO

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

How Google's Penguin update impacts SEO

welcome to another episode of Weekly Marketing Tips. I'm Brad Batesole and this week, I wanted to discuss Google's latest search algorithm update, Penguin. Google first launched the Penguin update in April 2012 as a way to catch websites that were spamming the search results. These would be sites that were specifically using link schemes to manipulate the search rankings. Essentially, Penguin goes out and hunts down all of these unnatural, inorganic links. These would be ones that were bought, placed, or traded solely for the purpose of improving search results.

But one of the downsides of this, was that anytime a website was dinged for having these bad links, the rank improvement after resolving that problem would take a really long time. Penguin would kind of crawl a site and then it would go off and it may not return for a long time. So if it identified the problem, it couldn't revalue the website and allow that rank to improve even if the website owner had repaired the results. So this is one of the things that's been resolved in the latest update, and you're going to see two key changes in this latest announcement.

First is that Penguin is now real time. So any changes or resolutions to any problems or any affective pages are going to be re-crawled and re-indexed in real time. There's no longer going to be this big wait to see the improvement or the return of the previous rank. Next, Penguin is now more granular. Google is now saying that Penguin is going to adjust the rank based on spam signals for particular sections of the site or particular pages, rather than devaluing the rank of the overall site.

So previously, if you had a problem, Google may take the entire site out of results and everything drops in rank, and now Google is saying it's possible that penalties will be delivered to a specific page rather than the entire domain. It's too early to tell exactly what's going on under the hood, so we can't be certain if this is a true fact, but Google seems to be pointing in that direction. It is important to know that every time Google makes these updates, it doesn't necessarily mean that sites that were previously penalized are going to rank again immediately.

We're just assuming that things are getting closer and closer to real time, which is going to allow Google to catch spam links much faster and help keep low-quality sites from ranking well in the search results. So, I want to walk through a few ways to keep your eye on this change and show you where some of this information is coming from. First things first, I've pulled up the quality guidelines from Google Search Console Help section. You can simply find these by doing a Google search for Google Quality guidelines. You'll find all of the things that Google is going to identify as bad quality.

This can help you determine if what you're doing is potentially against the rules. In this case we could click into link schemes and read everything we need to know about what defines a link scheme and how Google is going to decide whether what you've done is okay and genuine or if what you've done is potentially spammy and may result in you seeing a drop in rank. I would start by watching your organic traffic report in Google Analytics.

You're looking for any decline in that Google organic traffic. See if you identify a particular time that it started or if you identify any particular pages of your site that are all of a sudden dropping in rank. The next thing you can do is spend some time reviewing the various reports within Google Search Console. The first report I've pulled up is the Search Analytics report, and you can get to this under the Search Traffic heading, followed by Search Analytics. I'll turn on the impressions view by toggling it, and you'll see in the chart below, we can see total clicks over total impressions.

Essentially, we'd be looking for any major decline or something that deviates from what we see normally. Now in this case, there's a giant spike here on a particular day, but that is associated with a particular piece of content and has nothing to do with any ranking or algorithm updates. The other thing you'd like to look at is your Manual Actions report. Here you'd identify if there were any manual web spam actions that you needed to review and comply with. Additionally, you'll want to toggle the Security Issues report. This report will help you identify any negative consequences that Google's identified.

You can click into this report to identify exactly what those issues are and resolve them as is necessary. Next, I'd pull a list of any backlinks using a tool, such as SEMrush or Moz.com. I've gone ahead and pulled up a backlinks report for lynda.com using SEMrush. Here I've got to their Domain Analytics section and selected Backlinks, and here within the Backlinks tab, I can see this entire report of all of the backlinks. But what makes this more helpful, is that I can select this Trust Score view and identify what they believe are sites with a very low trust score.

If we identify sites with a very low trust score, it may indicate that that URL could potentially be seen by Google as a spammy URL and we may want to disavow that or request removal of our website from that site if we deem that it is, in fact, a spammy website. Take some time this week to look through your analytics and do some research to see if Penguin is impacting your website negatively or even positively. Thanks for checking in this week. As always, I'd love to hear from you.

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