Google started rolling out the new iteration of their Penguin algorithm, Penguin 3.0, starting from October 17th.

Even though the official name for this is Penguin 3.0, this is supposed to be more of a data-update to the existing Penguin algorithm than an all-new algorithm altogether. You, therefore, can still follow the same steps that you used to recover from Google Penguin before. You can check out this recently published infographic by Ahrefs, in collaboration with me, that’ll help you with exact steps and details of each step for recovering your website from a Google Penguin penalty.

Nature of the Penguin 3.0 Update

Google Engineer Pierre Far has shared some useful details about the update in a Google+ post:

  • It affects <1% search queries in English (US) SERPs.
  • It’s more of a Penguin refresh in nature than a significant update to the Penguin algorithm.
  • It’s undergoing a slow, global roll-out that might take several weeks to settle down.

He also went on to state that

This refresh helps sites that have already cleaned up the webspam signals discovered in the previous Penguin iteration, and demotes sites with newly-discovered spam.

Targets of Penguin 3.0

#1: Niche-relevant Web 2.0 Sites

A lot of members of Blackhat.Community went crazy over getting their Web 2.0 networks hit by this new update. According to them, and my own research, Web 2.0 sites like free sites created on platforms like Weebly, Webs, etc. and WordPress.com, Blogspot, etc. blogs got hit if they were being used for mainly link building purposes. Sites having excessive links from such sites got penalized heavily, and that holds true even more for sites that utilized low-quality Web 2.0 sites that had spun contents and a low-quality user experience in general.

#2: Forum Link Spam

People who were previously using automated tools for building forum profiles (obviously spammy) for the sole purpose of link building, have reported that their sites got hit heavily by Penguin 3.0.

#3: Contextual Link Spam

Sites that used popular mass link building tools like GSA Search Engine Ranker and built contextual links with the hope of those links looking more natural than other types of spammy links like forum profiles and guestbook spam, got hit badly as well.

#4: High Anchor-text Percentages

Uneven link profiles with a high percentage of links pointing exact match or partial match anchor-texts have taken a hit, and this time more badly than in case of previous updates, when Penguin 3.0 started rolling out. So, even if you stick to white hat SEO, don’t try to build anchor-text rich links using means such as guest posts unless you want to invite risk.

#5: Sites that Got Negative SEO’ed

This update seemed pretty inaccurate in differentiating genuine cases of link spam usage and cases involving negative SEO. Thousands of site owners turned to Twitter and various webmaster forums to express their grief about getting their site penalized upon the arrival of this new update as a result of their competitors’ negative SEO’ing those sites. Though sites can recover from negative SEO, it involves quite a bit of work that doesn’t bring any additional value to the users.

Conclusion

Though Penguin 3.0 rolled out a whole year after Penguin 2.1 first rolled-out (back on October 4th, 2013), Google seems to finally have implemented a setup that’ll allow them to push future refreshes of Penguin much more frequently than was the case with 3.0.

This is some good news for site owners whose disavow files didn’t yet get processed in this latest Penguin update, or whose sites recently got hit (unfortunately) by negative SEO. This can also deem negative SEO ineffective till some extent as long as the sufferer is willing to disavow the spammy links.

For regular searches who aren’t that bothered about this update, the good news is basically cleaner SERPs that are free from as many spammy results as possible.

Did your site get hit or did it benefit from this update? Let me know in the comments section below.