Google’s own Matt Cutts announced that during the afternoon of October 5th 2012, Google launched a data refresh of its Penguin algorithm to combat spam even further in their search results. This new algorithm update will affect many languages including a 0.3% effect of all English language search queries.
- Google Penguin Releases to date thus far:
- Penguin 1: April 24th 2012 (3.1% of all search queries effected)
- Penguin 2: May 26th 2012 (less than 0.1% of all English search queries)
- Penguin 3: October 5th 2012 ( impacts 0.3% of all English search queries)
The chief of Google’s web spam team posted in a series of tweets on twitter that, “A Penguin data refresh is on its way and that about 0.3 percent of English-language queries will be noticeably affected.” When Cutts states that a noticeably affect of search results will be seen, we got a sense from Cutts that it means “more than the norm”. Cutts also added that a smaller percentage of search queries in other languages such as Spanish, Italian, and French will also be affected by the new Penguin Algorithm update.
To see how this new update affected some sites, including the other algorithm update that Google just launched (EMD Algorithm Update) which was the Exact Match Domain Algorithm update; we wanted to see how our experiment was unfolding for a so called online web/seo company that we wrote about on August 5th 2012 and August 12th 2012. As we started using the same search terms on the web for some of the client’s for this company that we preformed back in August, we see a drastic change in their search engine rankings. Here is a good example:
If you Google the term, “Brooklyn Dentist”, the company client, OurBrooklynDentist DOT com used to be on the first page of Google for this search term, now the client is nowhere to be seen on the first 10 pages (we did not go past page 10). Even for the company itself, we did a search for, “Long Island SEO Company” which this search query used to show the client as #1 on the first page of Google, now we did not even see the company on the first 5 pages (we did not go past page five). It seems that the algorithm update definitely caught up to this company which we figured it would sooner or later. Now what’s next for these sites that have been affected by these new Google Penguin Algorithm updates? A little panic and a lot of reconsideration requests? Stay tuned and see what our experiments continue to uncover. What we do know however, is that Google’s Penguin Algorithm update seems to be taking effect on sites with irrelevant low quality inbound links from sites with other irrelevant links and low page rank. Its too bad a lot of sites focus on black hat techniques which they believe will never catch up to them, what a pity.