Penguin was initially launched on April 24, 2012. It was designed to reduce black hat web spam and discourage web owners and SEO practitioners who use illegal strategies, like keyword stuffing and illicit link schemes, to boost a site’s search rankings. Since them, Penguin has been updated four times. This year, there has been one update in May before the fifth one was officially confirmed a few days ago.
Although many websites refer to the latest Google algorithm update as “Penguin 5,” it is actually only Penguin 2.1 in Google terms. According to the tech giant, the May update was only the second major update to Penguin since it was first introduced last year. As such, Google elected to call the latest development as Penguin 2.1 since it is only a relatively minor change to the previous Penguin filter.
So how does the new Penguin update works with the new Google Hummingbird algorithm? According to experts, Penguin is just a part of Hummingbird. For example, if Hummingbird is Google’s entire ranking engine, Penguin is just a tool designed to sort out spammy websites. It is basically a filter that Google can remove and improve anytime. But with the help of the new Penguin update, Google Hummingbird will be able to provide users with better search results.
Meanwhile, for those who are unfamiliar with Penguin search algorithm, you might be wondering how it can affect your website. As mentioned earlier, the tech giant introduced the search algorithm to weed out websites that spam Google’s results, as well as those that may have purchased paid links and resorted to illegal SEO practices.
So how do you know if you’re website has been hit by Penguin? If you were affected by the latest search algorithm update, you’ll know if you notice that incoming traffic to your site has significantly declined. Take note that you cannot send Google a request for reconsideration since Penguin is an automated process. The only option you need to take is to either disavow bad links to your site or to manually have them removed. Until Google sees that all bad links have been removed, you have no chance of recovering.
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