What is Google Penguin And What are and its Functions ?

In this article, we are going to discuss and understand the basics about one of the most important Google algorithms update that is Google penguin. Many of us, when surf sites or blogs related to SEO (search engine optimization), blogging, we always get confused with these words which are Panda and Penguin or recover from panda / Penguin. When you through the article, you will gain their basics or I mean to say what actually they are? So, let’s start with Penguin itself.

Google Penguin- Google Penguin is an algorithm update as Google Panda (Panda Aimed in do wn ranking websites which provided poor user experience). Now the first question which arises in our mind is what is algorithm update? Don’t worry, I have written my previous post about “search algorithms” kindly go through it once.

•  What are search algorithms and their functions?

Gone through the above post! Now u can understand Google Penguin better. As I said it’s a “search algorithms” update (Codenamed as Penguin) which was announced by Google on April 24, 2012 after Panda update. Initial Penguin update is targeted towards webspam, on 25^th May, 2012, Google released Penguin 1.1. This update was designed to caught and punish, websites which are involved in over optimization. Penguin 3^rd update was released on 9^th Oct, 2012 and the 4^th Penguin algorithm update, which is known as Penguin 2.0 version 4, rolled out on 22^nd May, 2013. Google first released Panda and then Penguin to punish low quality websites and reward high quality websites with quality content.

Now the question arises Why Google launch these updates?

Answer to the above question is very simple, Google did this only for their searchers or we can say that for their searchers convenience. Google roll out these updates for refreshing their search index, so the websites which are involve in blackhat SEO practices and violates their quality guidelines got caught and penalized for the same. It ranks down the websites with unethical practices and reward websites with quality content by ranking them up.

When Google released these updates, many websites which are involve in web spamming, over optimization got penalized and experienced a great downfall in their traffic and pagerank. Besides them which are positively punished, many websites, which are not involved in these bad practices or blackhat practices, got hit by these updates. They are always confused with their onsite SEO as they don’t know where they got wrong. As always, after these updates, Google released different reconsideration forms for webmasters which are negatively hit but these forms are not the solution, you have to repair your own site and wait for the refresh, before your site will recover, I mean to say that Google yet to define that actually what signals these updates should pick up so that some good sites were not got caught and penalized.

Google Penguin basically targets websites which are involved in:-

   

   

   (1)   Excessive Link building- Excessive or we can say unnatural backlink building by using backlink  building tools or link exchange schemes or by purchasing backlinks.

  

   (2)   Keyword stuffing and invisible text

  

   (3)   Cloaking- Serving users with different content and URL’s.

  

   (4)   Duplicate content- Content copied from other websites or sources.

  

   (5)   Overuse of exact match domains.

If you saw good or we can say major traffic losses after the release of these updates. Kindly check your Google Webmasters account for any messages such as spam penalty etc. If you are unable to fix it, contact your SEO provider and start troubleshooting.

You might also like:-

• How to recover from Penguin 2.0?

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Article by Sandeep Gupta

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