Has the Google Penguin become the punisher ?
Eric Enge wrote a very good article on Search Engine Land that took a look at how punitive the Google Penguin really is. Enge expressed that he had a heavy heart with relation to the unforgiving nature of the Penguin.
Enge gives those webmasters new to the game a primer on how the Penguin came to be:
History Of Penguin
The first release of Penguin took place on April 24, 2012, and it landed on the industry like a ton of bricks. From my perspective, everything seemed normal when Penguin 1.1 landed on May 25, 2012.
Things were looking like Panda, that we might expect regular updates, and webmasters who had been gobbled up by Penguin had a reasonable way to recover if they cleaned up their acts and started doing what Google wanted. But then the updates became rare. Here is the entire update history:
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Penguin #1 (1.0): April 24, 2012
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Penguin #2: May 25, 2012
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Penguin #3: October 5, 2012
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Penguin #4 (2.0): May 22, 2013
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Penguin #5: October 4, 2013
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And then, nothing!
I am not an SEO expert so let me get that out of the way up front, but I do read a lot about SEO and at times I think it can become confusing for those like myself who know a little, but nowhere near what an SEO professional knows.
From what I understand there has not been a new Penguin release for several months, and without it, those who have followed their Webmaster tools updates and have gotten links removed or disavowed, still cannot improve their ranking.
Enge points out three scenarios for why Google is doing what it is doing:
Why is Google handling Penguin this way? I can think of only three possible answers:
- Doing data refreshes of the algorithm is incredibly hard. I only list this one for completeness, because I don’t believe it to be true.
- They believe that frequent data refreshes would make it too easy for churn and burn spammers. This one is a real possibility.
- They are frustrated and angry after a long war against a tide of spammers that never stop. Just like the Roman army trying to hold back the barbarians.
Could it be that the third reason explains why Penguin almost never updates? All I can say to that is, I hope not.
There are 71 comments which are also very good, one commenter talked about how he has done all he could do and his business is still down because of no Penguin refresh.
Karl Baxter wrote:
There’s rumour’s that google will not refresh penguin as Matt Cutts stated “they can’t run penguin as it is too susceptible to negative seo. and they don’t care who is affected” I am a business owner that made the mistake of paying a trusted S.E.O company in the UK to work on our site in 2010 to 2012 , My site got hit in April 2012 and I have done everything possible to try to get my site to recover. I know its my fault as I did not understand S>E>O fully and was at the time happy with the results but with 95% of organic traffic removed my company is really struggling now and I have had to make Family members redundant including my Brother
Please Please Please Google can you refresh the data. I can do no more now on link removals every spam link has been removed or disavow’ed our link profile is showing only 80 spam domain left (all disavow’ed) that are Live and over 700 domains with natural links including links from the BBC, NBC, Yahoo News etc Our website is a good quality site that provides a great user experience, but no organic rankings
Read the full article here
