Penguin 4.0 - State of Search 2016

Eric Enge @stonetemple

Penguin 4.0


ERIC ENGE, CEOSTONE TEMPLE CONSULTING

NOTABLE SPEAKER, BOOK AUTHOR & ENTREPRENEUR 2016 US Search Awards 2016 Search Personality of the Year

2016 Landys Search Marketer of the Year


Penguin #1 (1.0): April 24, 2012Penguin #2: May 25, 2012Penguin #3: October 5, 2012Penguin #4 (2.0): May 22, 2013Penguin #5: October 4, 2013Penguin 3.0: October to December 2014

Penguin Drove Large Traffic Drops

Early Algo Release Dates:


Prior Releases of Penguin Penalized Sites


Penguin Used to Penalize the Entire Site


Prior Versions Updated Rarely, Often Less Than Once Per Year

“Always Look at the Bright Side of Life”


Types of Links Targeted by Penguin

Web Directories

Article directories

International links

Bad anchor text mix

Coupon Codes Poor Quality Widgets Affiliate Spam Other Non-

Editorial Links

Request removal first

… then disavow the

rest


What About Penguin 4.0?

Released on September 23, 2016

Represents a Sea Change in the way Penguin Works

No Longer Assesses a “Penalty”

Simply Discounts the “Bad Links”


Penguin 4.0 Adjusts Link Signal Weights

Link SignalsDatabase

Penguin adjusts weighting of links as they

are discovered


Penguin 4.0 is More Granular

“Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.”

Google’s Gary Illyes


Penguin 4.0 is More Granular

Kristian

Eric Enge


Normal Crawling Drives Link Discovery

Updating the Database does

NOT immediately

impact rankingsLink SignalsDatabase


New Links Applied to Your PageWhen It’s Recrawled

Link SignalsDatabase


New Penguin Releases Will …

1. Address New Link Types

2. Adjust Ranking Weights

3. Process Collections of Link Signals in New Ways


How Impact of Penguin Releases Will be Felt


Speculation: Disavow Files Used to Train Penguin


Econsultancy.com, DA 83 Site



Jon Cooper, PointBlankSEO


Reconsideration Requests are Irrelevant

“Absolutely no reconsideration request can help you with Penguin. Reconsideration requests are for manual actions, and you can only file one if we have an incident created internally. Penguin doesn't create an incident, it never did and I'm very certain it never will. Reconsideration requests do not and will not help with Penguin.”



E-Commerce Site Example

Source: Marie Haynes











Nationally Recognized

Brand




Brand




Brand




Brand



Large B2B Company



Large B2B Company



What Can you Do?

Well, Actually, Go Get New Great Links


Do Prune Your Bad Links on a Regular Basis

Disavow Bad Links Found!


Also, Worry About Manual Reviews

Can Penguin Lead to Manual

Reviews?


What About Negative SEO?

“So the thing about negative SEO is that, to this date, I haven’t seen a single…well, not just me but also the ranking team hasn’t seen a single case where it was really negative SEO. It was more about clients not revealing details to the SEO who was doing the cleanup, for example”



Eric [email protected]

@stonetemple+Eric Enge

(508) 962-8474www.stonetemple.com

Thank You!

Penguin 4.0 - State of Search 2016

Marketing