A bird eye view of Google Penguin

The Google Penguin is an update which was announced by Google in 2012. It is an effort taken for rewarding the quality websites and diminishing the websites that are collaborated with keyword stuffing and link schemes which are manipulative. This update is meant to target the SEO’s and websites who are using spammy backlinks or blackhat for achieving a higher ranking. It is one of the total 200 signals that Google uses for the determination of Search Rankings. Google has officially announced that the 2016 Penguin update is the last update of the main Google Algorithm.

The work process of Google Penguin

As it has already been mentioned, this update is meant to target websites that use blackhat in order to achieve better rankings. There are different ranking factors on which the Google Algorithm scores. To give you the idea about what type of backlinks Google targets, here are few examples;

• The backlinks who come from low-quality websites.
• The one from controversial countries
• The backlinks that were incentivized
• The one which was created in high quantity in a lesser time period
• The one which was built using some kind of online tool
• The backlinks with common text

Google crawls to each and every website whereas Penguin scores it on the basis of its quality. If your website is at the exit gate, the Penguin will penalize it until it gets the required cleaning. It can well be an example of webspam.

Watch out for these links

There are certain links which Google labels in order to make you think mentally about the backlinks. Some of them are:

• Links impacted by Penguin
• The footer links
• The links that were denied

One of the easiest ways to understand the work process of Google Penguin is to look at the “link schemes” in the Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. They give you even the minute details of the type of link schemes which can possibly impact your website in a bad way.

• Advertorials
• The advertisements which have do-follow links
• Blog posts containing links and forum comments
• Article marketing on a large scale
• Exchanging links
• Links to templates
• Selling or buying do-follow links

So, it is a well-known fact that if you have got these backlinks in a huge number, you should be ready to lose website rankings in Google.

Recovering from the Google Penguin

Many of the websites and eBooks have given their ideas and opinion about how to recover from Google Penguin. Recovering from it cut down to few of the things.

• Identifying everything which can cause harm
• Figuring out the spam links on your website
• Denying the links which you are not able to diminish
• Removal of the spammy links

Once this process is over, Google Penguin will crawl to your website and will determine it on the basis of the changes made by you recently. In 2016, Google Penguin would sometime take even a year or more in some of the cases. But nowadays, Google Penguin updates much faster as compared to the old times. Google Penguin works for both. It has been quicker over the years both in the recovery as well as in the penalties.