How to Master SEO with Penguin 4.0, Google's New Real Time Algorithm Update

There’s great news for small businesses or anybody who works in (ethical) SEO. Many businesses around the world have been awaiting for the release of Google Penguin 4.0. As we reported in our blog post here, Penguin is now part of the core Google algorithm and is therefore applied in real-time. So, this will be the last announced Google Penguin update ever and in the future Penguin updates will be business as usual to Google and applied on a day-to-day basis.

So is this good news for everyone?

The reality is many sites will rise and many sites will fall in ranking. The Google update appeared to hit us a little later here in the UK, with many of the sites that we monitor here at Opace only showing a notable change just prior to last weekend, around Thursday 6th October.

What we can say is that having now carried out many post Penguin 4.0 checks, sites that were penalised and have cleaned up their backlinks, as well as those that weren't penalised, are seeing a huge increase in rankings and overall Google visibility. In some cases we're seeing an increase of 30% in in overall rankings across Google.com and Google.co.uk.

Throughout this article we'll be looking at the factors which will determine the winners and losers from this Google algorithm update.

Anatomy of winners and losers post Penguin 4.0

The list below shows the anatomy of winning and losing websites post Penguin 4.0:

Relevancy:

• Winning sites will obtain backlinks relevant to their genre, with relevant content and relevant anchor text
• Losing sites will post anywhere and not concern themselves with the relevance of the site, the content, anchor text and where the link is to

Anchor text diversity:

• Winning sites will have diverse and natural anchor text, not heavily keyword optimised and will be entirely organic
• Losing sites will have Anchor text that is too often similar and heavily keyword optimised. Looking through backlink portfolios anchor text will appear unnatural

Backlink removals / disavowments:

• Winning sites will manually review their backlinks for quality, probably on a regular basis and request removal of any bad links from the sites in question. Where needed they will disavow poor quality links
• Losing sites will not have a grip of their backlinks and will have neither asked for the removal or disavowment of bad links

Approach to backlinks:

• Winning sites will adopt a less is more approach and seek to obtain links on only the best sites and in natural ways
• Losing sites will adopt a scattergun approach and therefore obtain a backlink profile of variable quality (which will still include some good links).

Traffic levels:

• Winners will experience ranking rises and traffic level increases
• Losers will experience drops in rankings and traffic levels will fall

When looking at each heading it’s easy to see that the winners operate in an entirely polar opposite way to the losers, as you would expect!

Is Google Penguin a Penalty or an algorithm?

Of course Google Penguin is an algorithm and it’s a myth that it’s a penalty. The reality is that by taking the right actions website owners can stay on the right side of the Google Penguin algorithm and be a winner. It’s all about running well-planned, natural marketing campaigns and being relevant. Winners will include anchor text is diverse and ensure that toxic links are either removed or disavowed. Owners also need to ensure that only links to quality sites are obtained.

Our analysis here at Opace has shown that there are as many sites which are winners as there are losers following Google Penguin. After all for every site which falls there is likely to be a site which rises. Where a website falls in the rankings (and therefore traffic), it’s not a case of being hit with a Google Penguin penalty. Instead it’s about not complying with Google guidelines, especially those relating to backlinks and the requirements of the Penguin algorithm.

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