In latest webmaster hangout once again question was raised regarding the upcoming penguin update. Gary said last week there will be an update to penguin algorithm. He went on to say we can expect it as early as next week as far as everything goes along well in their testing. I think the major problem they are facing in testing is how to avoid any low quality unnatural links that look suspicious. When I say suspicious I mean how will Google tackle links posted by competitors or potential negative SEO attacks?

Latest Penguin Update
As usual we had similar answer in the latest webmaster hangout video from John Mueller. He is always ambiguous when it comes to answering penguin related questions. May be possibly, soon etc.

This is the question asked about the update.

https://plus.google.com/events/c85irs07tovcb1ur7r6bpm9p05g

” Is it true Google is in the final stages of releasing Penguin 3.0? Would you estimate its days/weeks away now?”

A: Yes we are working on it, I estimate it probably few weeks not too much longer. As I always say these kind of time-lines are really hard to judge because we do a lot of testing towards the end and we need to make sure everything is working right like before. So this is something we can’t promise now. If it is not released yet I believe whenever the right time comes it will be done. I know we are pretty close and lot of you are waiting for that, I know that so soon but not today.

 

 

Question: Any news about next Penguin update? Potential  release date? Something more about new factors? Monthly update and possible recovery? Everyone punished gets notification?

John: At the moment I don’t have anything to update you in regards to the penguin update but I know the engineers are working on something that should be available fairly anytime soon. I don’t have any specific time frame when it comes to penguin update so not today, not tomorrow, but I am guessing pretty soon certainly by the end of the year is my current guess. And when it comes to time frames about algorithms it is always a bit tricky when you are looking at something in Google’s web search because on the other hand we have to make all the changes but we need to go through these algorithms and the test data to make sure everything works fine and on the other hand we also have to kind of review the data that gets generated there and that it is actually useful data that is really providing useful additional information in search and not just something that is actually running but not have any real value in it. So that is something we are aware that is happening in the process well when working on the algorithm the data that seems to be created from the algorithm should be good. That is the reason we cannot say when it will actually be ready. So if everything goes well then the process happens that much faster  but if something goes wrong then we have to rethink oh we have a problem then it will take a week longer or a month longer that is all I can say.

Question: The problem here is some webmasters are saying it’s here, its live, so in this hangout can you be a bit more transparent can you give some more data, people are saying penguin is already out ?

Answer This is something that we do run test from time to time to see how things kind of react where we do live test, we do that a lot with features in web search for example that is one place where it is particularly visible where we will do on 1% of the traffic or maybe we do on more 3 or 4 or 5% of the traffic data with our updated algorithm and see if that really brings out measures that shows actually good change in that. So there are good possibility of things that people are expected to see from time to time whether it is specifically from the penguin algorithm or not is kind of uncertain because if you are looking at specific UI information in search you don’t really see what’s in that search.

Question: So just to be clear Gary said last week that if you disavowed something 2 weeks or so then those disavowed will not be included in the next coming penguin algorithm? He said that clearly don’t know whether you were there or not ?

Answer: I don’t know that is something that is currently looked at. I know you guys are waiting for this and I know that lot of people have put in a lot of effort actually to clean all these issues but there are probably other sites that never bother cleaning up and continue doing micro spam things and that is something those sites won’t probably see changes but I know there are really many well intention webmasters out there who notice the back links problems, solve the issue coming up and work to clean that up so we are happy to kind of get the word out when it really comes out.

Question: There is a clear feeling that the site won’t just come up cleaning things after penguin update, there are so many other things that might need to be looked at?

Answer: Well, you can never say that my site was ranking No.2 one year ago and this algorithm brought my site to No.10 and therefore after this algorithm is refreshed my site will be back at No.2. There are so many things that happens in web search over the year that you cannot really expect things to be exactly the same if you cleaned up this problem. Other thing is if you site is unnaturally ranking higher then there is a problem. If for example if your site has lot of unnatural backlinks and we have incorrectly counted that for your site and that time you might rank higher than now where if you remove all of those backlinks then you stay in current state, so that is something we also keep in mind but I know there are a lot of people who take a lot of time to clean things up and really improve the website in all possible manner . I am hoping that kind of sites will see good results and a nice jump in rankings. But as always said we have a lot of different algorithms and your effort that you are doing working to clean up your site you should have been seeing some of those algorithm change as well. But I know this is a tough topic so I will answer this question but I have other question about penguin update in line now. So let us move on to the next question

 

 

 

Once again we have speculation around major blogs like searchengineland.com , seroundtable.com and Google plus posts that Google will update Penguin algorithm next week. Also Gary illyes mentioned in his speech, if everything goes along well there will be an update next week. It is obvious Google is concerned their algorithm might damage sites that may be attacked with negative links. Even I am very concerned because we have a very high ranking client site attacked by about 1000 low quality links. Though we immediately identified the problem and disavowed links, we are worried Google might think otherwise. This is the problem with Google’s penguin algorithm it can potentially damage a site even with links that are not in site owner’s control.

Penguin update next week
We are keeping our fingers crossed hopefully this update will be pleasant surprise for everyone who owns a site and does genuine search engine optimization. I believe Sites affected in ranking are said to recover and Google is expected to reduce the liability of a site owner for the backlinks he has. Google is set to ignore links rather than penalize a site based on it’s links. This is for sites which has a good natural link profile and some Spam links.

 

As expected yesterday’s webmaster hangout had question about Penguin update. A user asked

 Did Google use the disavow data on the last penguin update on 03/10/13 Penguin 2.1? And if Google runs Penguin again will the disavow data be used? 

John Mueller’s answer yes Google used disavow link files for penguin updates. Also he agreed that penguin hasn’t been updated for a long time and it is due anytime soon. Probably may be.

One more interesting question:

We were unable to recover our site since 2013 OCT and suspect penguin ALGO. We already removed all unnatural links. But still not revoke the penalty.

And the answer from Mueller.
Penguin update has not run quite sometime, you can recover if it could be picked up in near future. When the algorithm runs again sites will recover. But you need to see if the problem is not just about links. It could be contents too. So probably you need to check your contents to make sure other factors are not affecting your site.

One thing is very clear from this webmaster hangout video. Google agrees sites will recover only if Penguin update refresh happens. That is what we all were thinking and that is what is proved from Google’s own mouth.

Time to watch out is 30.20

 

Post penguin update new websites have sprung up like thorny shrubs. They are everywhere now. Most of the results are dominated with junk new sites. 5 page sites outrank 100 page quality sites. Courtesy penguin update. Reason all these junk new sites are ranking because they don’t have unnatural links. Or infact they don’t even have links when I last checked some of those sites. Sites with excellent quality information that users want to look are buried deep because they have few unnatural links. This is the scene in search engines now. If you don’t believe me check yourself. Check some medium competitive areas. Take top 30 sites and check their whois data. You will be ROFL. Many sites you will notice were registered post 2012. Some great sites registered before 10 years are nowhere to be found.

Penguin update likes new websites

This is the situation of Google now. All they want you is to build new sites and abandon old sites affected by penguin update. Already with billions of junk pages in Internet Google wants to add few million more junk sites. If that is what they want we will do that, thank you Google no worries.

I recommend everyone who lost ranking in penguin to abandon old sites and start new ones. This is from a SEO guy who has been looking and living in this Business for 10 years.

But wait we are about to see a new penguin update soon. So may be Google realizes their mistake and release some top quality sites and penalize real junk sites.

In my opinion all sites buying text links from good sites for search engine rankings should banned. Money power should never be allowed to influence results.

 

Bing recently updated it’s algorithm to tackle URL keyword stuffing. They agreed millions of spam URLs were removed. That is the type of update that tackles real spammers. Killing a site just because they had links from some article submission sites is not OK. You killed a site we own because it had article and bookmarking links and now that site has over 50,000 bookmark links. Who did that we don’t know. Google wake up don’t allow others to kill our sites. Come up with an intelligent update like Bing. Don’t allow others to take over the killer button keep it in your control our give us the control.

bing update better than penguin

Few points from their interesting blog post

As I mentioned in the previous blog, we will not be giving out specific details on detection algorithms because spammers are likely to use that knowledge to evolve their techniques. I can, however, tell you that we look at a number of signals that suggest possible use of URL keyword stuffing, such as:

  • Site size
  • Number of hosts
  • Number of words in host/ domain names and path
  • Host/ domain/ path keyword co-occurrence (inc. unigrams and bigrams)
  • % of the site cluster comprised of top frequency host/ domain name keywords
  • Host/ domain names containing certain lexicons/ pattern combinations (e.g. [“year”, “event | product name”], http://www.turbotaxonline2014.com)
  • Site/page content quality & popularity signals”

Bing has a long way to catch with Google but that doesn’t mean Google is outstanding. We love Google except the killer update nicknamed penguin which allowed others to hurt our sites.

 

 

 

John mueller says Google might bring up penguin update possibly in 2014. John mueller furthur said assuming Google might as well think of if possible release an update in the near future.

During a chat in latest webmaster hangout he said there should be an update most probably very soon. Most likely Google will update it’s algorithm this year or maybe they will do it within this year. We know John was very confident there will be most probable chance of a Google penguin update in the reasonable future. My head is spinning now are we gonna have an update?

We know we are in breaking point situation and the official word from Google is well hardly convincing.

Penguin-Update-2014

 

In the latest webmaster hangout video Mueller reiterated we can soon see a penguin update / refresh. He was joking when he said it is not today but will be in 2014. We all know from years of experience when Google does an update. It is mostly before the holiday season when the Business spikes. So as I guessed before it should mostly be in the 1st week of October.

 

Skip to about 53 minutes before you see the golden words from his month. We are waiting fingers crossed.

There are other places which discusses this.

Check it out here. http://searchengineland.com/nearly-year-later-finally-going-get-penguin-update-refresh-203210

http://www.webpronews.com/google-admits-penguin-needs-to-be-refreshed-more-quickly-is-working-on-that-2014-09

 

I am not complaining I know updates will happen and we need to be ready for it. But we always thought Google can never hurt a site based on it’s backlinks but Google proved us wrong. They did not care whether a backlink is built by the site owner or SEO company or by some spammer. They just went ahead and pressed the killer button. I am sorry to say Google your update is one of the biggest mistake you ever made. It is not because you killed many SEO Businesses it is because you allowed a site to be hurt by it’s backlinks. Now you need to face the wrath of many disgruntled webmasters. Now sites are attacking other sites with 1000s of negative links, I have to agree we tried that too and have success to some extent. So Google wake up and don’t allow webmasters to kill other good ranking sites. We don’t have time to check our links weekly to see if anyone is sending negative backlinks to us.

 

Why penguin update is a mistake

 

I recently saw a webmaster hangout video where John muller (  now the unofficial representative for Google webmaster team because Matt Cutts is on leave ) claims people are complaining about negative SEO for a long time. He even says it has been a claim since 2002. That is not true. Before penguin update there were claims of negative SEO, I agree but the whole game changed when you released penguin update. Before webmasters complained on something that they have control over. For example webmaster claimed a SEO company created cloaking pages on their site or a competitor hacked into their site and created cloaking pages. But how do you justify a backlink. No one can control a backlink to a site. You allowed site to be affected by a backlink. So this gave real chance for negative SEO attack. Before penguin update this was not possible but now it is possible. So negative SEO was always there but it became practically aggressive and possible only after penguin update. If you think it is not true then you are hiding your head like a ostrich and think nothing happens around you.