Google Penguin 4.0 update - What changed and what have we learned so far?

Cristian Level X³

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October 8, 2016, 9:51 am

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Google Penguin 4.0 update - What changed and what have we learned so far?

Google Penguin update 4.0 went live last month in September on the 24th. I made an announcement here: https://www.seoclerks.com/faq/19737/Google-Penguin-update-4-0-is-officially-live

So we've talked about the main changes of Penguin from what Google told us, which was, to be frankly, not much.

As SEOs, we need to test and test again how the update actually works to figure out ways of improving our optimization and out content. Knowing these "ranking" signals has always been important and it hasn't changed with this update.


So what have we learned so far from Penguin 4.0?

1. As Google said the updates happen now in real life as soon as the Google crawler, end up crawling your website. Not many SEOs reported rank changes in the first couple of days. I myself found that only after 1 week some bigger changes started happening and most of my sites improved in rankings.

2. Some websites got panelized, unfortunately, some of us weren't that lucky, few websites got panelized as soon as Penguin rolled out.

3. Some people got the penalty removed. This means you don't need to wait for long periods of time to for Google to lift your penalty now, it can happen overnight and some lucky SEOs managed to remove penalties after this update.

4. In the past you could do lots of black-hat SEO to a website, improving its rankings but you will only get penalized after a Google Penguin update, that meant spammers could hold top positions for months on end without getting hit. This is no longer the case, if you are doing the nasty SEO, you'll get hit as soon as the crawler lands on your website.

5. Doing white hat SEO is greater and better than ever. Some of your competitors may have been building fishy backlinks, because of Penguin 4.0 you will now have the chance to go up in rankings just because they will go down, simple as that!

What have you found out about Penguin 4.0?

Comments

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Lynne

Hi Cristian, that about sums up what I have heard and experienced so far. I think it is great that the people that are using black hat techniques are being penalized sooner. I also think it is great that website that have been penalized have a chance of recovering sooner.

I think all in all this just goes to show that the people using white hat techniques will be coming out tops.

I have seen a really nice increase in rankings over the last few weeks. Of course it could be all the effort I have been putting in, but I believe it has a lot to do with the recent updates too.

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Cristian

I bet it's both, your efforts plus the updates. And things are only going to improve over the next few weeks as Google end up crawling your whole website completely.

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RaduV

Well i believe that you sum up most of the changes. It is the same as it was with all the previous updates, the changes come after few days and those that played SEO the proper way benefited the most.
You can see that Google is trying to keep the competition fair and more accurate results. Reward is seen in better rankings and more organic traffic.

As always, there are users that are not satisfied with these updates but if you are keep it "white hat" you shoudn't be worried about these changes.

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Cristian

It's not really the same as the last update, the difference with Penguin 4.0 is that after the new changes take place, other will follow, the update is constant now, we don't have to wait for a couple of months for a new Penguin update.

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Shruti045

I think link earning is better practice than link building. To recover from Penguin 4 effects, disavow tool should be used more and more.

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Corzhens

I am confused with the so called Google updates that I have been reading in this site. It really makes me wonder what the purposes of those updates are. Why does Google issue new policies from time to time regarding SEO methods? Is Google so engrossed with SEO like some webmasters that I know that it is like SEO is the only thing revolving around them? Anyway, thanks for sharing this report.

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