**Penguin finally lands**
After years of waiting from the SEO community, Google has finally rolled out its real-time Penguin algorithm.
The search engine giant announced on Friday (23rd September 2016) that Penguin has now been incorporated into its core algorithm, meaning that, for good and for bad, Google will be able to identify and act upon spam backlinks more quickly.
Read on to learn more about the Penguin update and how it might affect your website.
**What is the Penguin algorithm?**
The Penguin algorithm was first released in April 2012 and marked one of the first major shifts in how Google ranks web pages.
It was designed to outlaw websites that attempted to boost their search engine rankings by purchasing backlinks. These were usually from spammy websites, of questionable repute, that had no relevance at all to the website attempting to rank. The web was awash with directories and so-called “free” indexes, and link building was big business.
But the introduction of Penguin marked Google’s transition from delivering search results that were fairly easy to manipulate by (now-outdated) SEO tactics, to actively penalising sites that did so. Along with various other algorithms, Google elevated the user experience as the most important factor to consider when appealing to search engines.
**What’s the impact of a real-time Penguin algorithm?**
Penguin moving into real-time is something of a double-edged sword. Previously, any website hit by a penalty from Penguin would have to wait for the algorithm to be updated before it saw an improvement in its rankings. And this could be months after the spammy backlinks that pointed to it were cleaned up. Now, Penguin will be refreshing all the time, so if a site receives a penalty, it can recover more quickly after the appropriate clean-up work is done.
However, the downside is that Google will now be scanning for spammy backlinks all the time, which will makes it much easier for a site to see a rankings drop. This could be due to historic webspam, aggressive competitor activity or through the misguided implementation of old-school SEO tactics.
Google has also advised that the impact of Penguin will be more granular than previous incarnations, meaning that it’s more likely that individual pages suffer, rather than the whole site disappearing from view.
**What do I need to do to my website as a result of Penguin?**
With Penguin now functioning in real time, it’s even more important to be vigilant about your backlinks. Assess which sites are linking back to yours on a regular basis, and only ever pursue links that are relevant to your business. Link building is still hugely important to your site’s SEO, but it needs to be done properly, and sadly, here at Superdream, we still see spammy practices on a regular basis.
**(link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/contact-us/ text: Drop us a line)** if you’d like us to take a look at your site’s backlink profile, or help you improve your website’s performance.