Worse still, this penalty would remain in effect until Penguin's next refresh - which sometimes took months - even if you proactively fixed the issue immediately Phone after receiving your penalty. Penguin 4.0 changed all that. Now, Penguin refreshes in real time, which means site penalties are incurred or waived each time Google crawls and re-indexes a page. In other words, spammy link building could burn your SERPs tomorrow, but you no longer have to wait ages for a penalty to be lifted. Advertising Continue reading below Penguin's latest update is also more granular, meaning Google will penalize individual pages as opposed to your entire Phone website. If Penguin detects web spam on your website, it may bury the offending page in the SERPs, but the rest of your domain still has the potential to rank well. How will Penguin 4.0 affect my website?
The effects of a Penguin update are fax list usually felt immediately in the SEO community: “black hat” SEO is penalized, while websites that have had their Phone penalties lifted begin to climb back up the ranks. But Penguin's latest update is a little odd — if you'll pardon the pun — because most SEOs and webmasters didn't feel its effects until a few days after Google started rolling it out. According to Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin, SEOs started experiencing SERP flow about three to five days after the update. He surveyed his subscribers and found that 24-28% of them were affected by the update, with some feeling the effects later than others. Most of the affected Phone websites - including Moz itself - received a slight improvement in rankings, and only a small number of sites suffered penalties. The bottom line is that the latest Penguin update will not harm non-spam websites.
In fact, the update is likely to improve the rankings of websites that improve their links and focus on quality content. The excellent case studies of Marie Phone Haynes bear witness to this. She lists many examples of websites that have been taken down for years (some since Penguin launched in 2012) finally escaping the shackles of their sanctions. In one striking example, a previously penalized e-commerce store now ranks 10th for a keyword that it ranked 95th just two months ago. ? Hopefully Phone positively. As Rand says, “Penguin 4.0 is a great time to cheer on Google. It drove a lot of traffic to many good websites and pushed many sketchy links down. We'll see [what] happens with respect to disavowals and requests for reconsideration for the future.