Google Is Altering Penguin To Include “Continuous Updates”

A Google spokesperson has said that the company will now be updating the Penguin algorithm continuously by optimizing it as they go. Since Google’s “Florida” update in November 2003, the search engine has kept to an unofficial promise to not make changes to its ranking algorithm during the holiday season. However, that’s changed this year with a flurry of Penguin updates.

“That last big update is still rolling out – though really there won’t be a particularly distinct end-point to the activity, since Penguin is shifting to more continuous updates,” a Google spokesperson explained. “The idea is to keep optimizing as we go now.”

Penguin is Google’s specialized filter that is designed to fight spam that gets past its regular spam fighting tools. When sites are hit by Penguin, they are marked with a massive penalty until they fix their spam issues. Once the site has resolved its problems, it must wait until the next time the Penguin filter is run. The sites will then have their penalties removed, provided that Google’s filter likes what it sees.

Websites that received Penguin penalties by the Penguin 2 update in 2013 had to wait a full year to have the penalties lifted, until Penguin 3 was released. However, since that time, there may have been as many as three Penguin updates made by Google. Based on the fact that these updates have happened from Thanksgiving onward, Google is clearly no longer following its unofficial promise to avoid updates during the holiday season.

Everyone in the industry seems to agree that many people who were hit by Penguin 3.0 saw changes on Thanksgiving Day. Google stated that the Thanksgiving update was part of the Penguin 3.0 rollout, however, updates rarely take six weeks to launch. Additionally, updates rarely cause fluctuations toward the end of a rollout. This is often a sign of a change to the filter, causing many industry insiders to believe there have been multiple changes made to the filter on various days in the first week of December. However, this fact has not been confirmed by Google.

Historically, Penguin algorithm updates have been processed offline and then Google would push the data live, thereby producing changes in the search results. It seems now that Google is saying they will change the algorithm within their live ranking processes.

One big question that remains is what this means for websites that were impacted by any of these live changes. Will their link removal efforts be processed between each live algorithm change, or will it only happen upon the release of Penguin 4.0? Google has made none of this clear thus far, but hopefully some further information will be released soon. For websites that have been hit by Penguin, the possibility of their penalties being able to be lifted sooner would come as great news, so they’ll be watching closely for further information to be released by Google.