Everything We Know about Google Penguin 4.0

benton
September 26, 2016
Blog

penguin-4-0 Google Penguin 4.0 was officially announced on Friday and I’ve waited a few days to collect various questions and observations.

I’ll be updating this post as more questions and observations are coming.

So what do we know by now?

From the official announcement:

Penguin 4.0 is real time (and part of algorithm): Google will determine if a web page should be affected by Penguin filter as it crawls the page. This means, you won’t need to wait till the next Penguin update to see if your site is no longer affected by it. The filter may be removed as soon as Google re-crawls the page again. This also means this is the last officially announced update.
Penguin 4.0 is now “granular” which sounds like it may affect pages or sections of the site, not always entire sites.

What does it mean?

Penguin will be hard to diagnose

With no dates and official announcements, Penguin will become very hard to diagnose, especially if the site is partially effected.

This means a thorough professional backlink profile audit is more important than ever.

Should disavow still be used?

Yes, it has been confirmed that Disavowing bad links is a viable option after you did you due diligence in removing them.

URLs is the disavow file should be re-crawled for those backlinks to be discounted (same as before)

Observations so far:

It looks like the impact has been very mild but it only confirms that Penguin is now real time: It takes time to crawl the web!

No signs of major SERP movement yesterday – the two days since Penguin started rolling out have been quieter than most of September.

— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) September 24, 2016

Fits w/ the idea that this new Penguin inside the core algo is a learning system, not a set of hard-coded rules https://t.co/Jh63YfkFzu

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) September 24, 2016