The Real Time Penguin (4.0) Algorithm is Live

The two year long wait has finally come to an end. This week, Google has finally updated its Penguin Algorithm, and they also say that this will be the last ever update to Penguin that they’re going to announce, given its all new Real-Time nature. Penguin now runs in real time straight within the core Google search algorithm.

All of Google’s algorithms have always relied on over 200 kinds of unique signals or “cues” which is what makes searching whatever it might be that you’re looking for efficient. These cues also include details sure as the specific words that might appear on all of the various websites, the region that you perform the search from, the freshness of the content that’s posted on the website, and also PageRank. One of the signals is specifically called Penguin, and it was first launched back in 2012 and has received an update to version 4.0 this week.

The news of this update was released by Google on the Google Webmasters Blog. Penguin 3.0 was released in 2014 and this new update will be the last that Google ever announce to their Penguin Algorithm.

What Google mean when they say real-time is that as soon as Google recrawls and reindexes any of the pages that you’re working on, the signals will used in the new Penguin Algorithm at that very instant. Google has already done this with Panda when it was to become a part of the core algorithm.

What penguin does is that it acts as a filter that has been designed in order to capture the websites that have been spamming Google’s search results by using methods that Google’s basic spamming systems aren’t able to catch on to. Basically, what the Penguin does is that it runs and catches sites that have been deemed to be spam. The websites that it ends up catching stay penalized even after then having improved and changed to major extents till the time that the next run of the filter, which might even take months. Any website that was hit by Penguin 3.0 have waited about 2 years for the opportunity to be free from the penalty.

What this new update does is that it gets rid of this problems that websites ended up facing with Penguin 3.0.

Google has added that this update to Penguin is much more granulated. What this means is that it will now devalue spam not by affecting the entire websites ranking but now it just adjust the ranking based solely on the spam signals. Google says that it means more granularity than earlier, but it doesn’t precisely mean that it will only affect pages instead of entire websites.

Even after all of this, the Penguin update isn’t fully live just yet. All that Google has said is that it’s rolling out now. They didn’t mention how long it might take for it to roll out, but we suspect it’s going to take a couple of weeks, at most. You can expect to see the changes on your pages quicker if Google visits your page regularly and it might take a lot longer if it comes to your website infrequently.