After almost a two-year wait, the latest Penguin update rolled out in late September and into early October. This rollout is unusual in many ways, and it only now seems to be settling down. In the past couple of weeks, we've seen many reports of recoveries from previous Penguin demotions, but this post is about those who were left behind. What if you didn't recover from Penguin?
I'm going to work my way from unlikely, borderline conspiracy theories to difficult truths. Theories #1 and #2 might make you feel better, but, unfortunately, the truth is more likely in #4 or #5.
1. There is no Penguin
Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself. Ok, this is the closest I'll get to full-on conspiracy theory. What if this new Penguin is a ruse, and Google did nothing or rolled out something else? We can't know anything 100% without peering into the source code, but I'm 99% confident this isn't the case. Interpreting Google often means reading between the lines, but I don't know of any recent confirmed announcement that ended up being patently false.
Google representatives are confirming details about the new Penguin both publicly and privately, and algorithm flux matches the general timeline. Perhaps more importantly, we're seeing many anecdotal reports of Penguin recoveries, such as:
Given the severity of Penguin demotions and the known and infrequent update timelines, these reports are unlikely to be coincidences. Some of these reports are also coming from reliable sources, like Marie Haynes (above) and Glenn Gabe (below), who closely track sites hit by Penguin.
2. Penguin is still rolling out
This Penguin update has been unusual in many ways. It's probably best not to even call it "Penguin 4.0" (yes, I realize I keep calling it that). The new, "real-time" Penguin is not simply an update to Penguins 1–3. It replaces them and works very differently.
Because real-time Penguin is so different, the rollout was broken up into a couple of phases. I believe that the new code went live in roughly the timeline of Google's announcement date of September 23rd. It might have happened a day or two before that, but probably not weeks before. This new code, though, was the kinder, gentler Penguin, which devalues bad links.
For this new code to fully take effect, the entire link graph had to be refreshed, and this takes time, especially for deeper links. So, the impact of the initial rollout may have taken a few days to fully kick in. In terms of algorithm flux, the brunt of the initial release hit MozCast around September 27th. Now that the new Penguin is real-time, we'll be feeling its impact continuously, although that impact will be unnoticeable for the vast majority of sites on the vast majority of days.
In addition, Google has rolled back previous Penguin demotions. This happened after the new code launched, but we don't have an exact timeline. This process also took days, possibly a week or more. We saw additional algorithm spikes around October 2nd and 6th, although the entire period showed sustained flux.
On October 7th, Gary Illyes from Google said that the Penguin rollout was in the "final stage" (presumably, the removal of demotions) and would take a "few more days". As of this writing, it's been five more days.
My best guess is that 95%+ of previous Penguin demotions have been removed at this point. There's a chance you're in the lucky 5% remaining, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
3. You didn't cut nearly deep enough
During the few previous Penguin updates, it was assumed that sites didn't recover because they simply hadn't cut deep enough. In other words, site owners and SEOs had tried to surgically remove or disavow a limited number of bad links, but those links were either not the suspect links or were just the tip of the iceberg.
I think it's true that many people were probably trying to keep as many links as possible, and were hesitant to make the deep cuts Penguin required. However, this entire argument is misleading and possibly self-destructive, because this isn't how the new Penguin works.
Theoretically, the new Penguin should only devalue bad links, and its impact will be felt on a more "granular" (in Google's own words) level. In other words, your entire site won't be demoted because of a few or even a lot of bad links, at least not by Penguin. Should you continue to clean up your link profile? Possibly. Will cutting deeper help you recover from Penguin down the road? Probably not.
4. Without bad links, you'd have no links at all
Here's the more likely problem, and it's a cousin of #3. Your link profile is so bad that there is practically no difference between "demotion" and "devaluation." It's quite possible that your past Penguin demotion was lifted, but your links were so heavily devalued that you saw no ranking recovery. There was simply no link equity left to provide SEO benefit.
In this case, continuing to prune those bad links isn't going to help you. You need to build new quality signals and authoritative links. The good news is that you shouldn't have to wait months or years now to see the positive impact of new links. The bad news is that building high-quality links is a long, difficult road. If it were easy, you probably wouldn't have taken shortcuts in the first place.
5. Your problem was never Penguin
This is the explanation no one wants to hear, but I think it's more common than most of us think. We're obsessed with the confirmed update animals, especially Penguin and Panda, but these are only a few of the hundreds of animals in the Google Zoo.
There were algorithmic link demotions before Penguin, and there are still parts of the algorithm that look for and act on bad links. Given the power that links still hold over ranking, this should come as no surprise. The new Penguin isn't a free pass on all past link-building sins.
In addition, there are still manual actions. These should (hopefully) show up in Google Search Console, but Google will act on bad links manually where it's warranted.
It's also possible that you have a very different algorithmic problem in play or any of a number of technical SEO issues. That diagnostic is well beyond the scope of this blog post, but I'll offer this advice — dig deeper. If you haven't recovered from Penguin, maybe you've got different or bigger problems.
Great article Dr. Pete. I'm honored to be included.
Gary Illyes confirmed yesterday that they have indeed finished removing Penguin demotions from all sites that have been hit by all of the previous versions of Penguin. So, if people haven't seen any recovery then it likely means that #4 or #5 is true.
I'd add another option and that's that you had recovery, but it wasn't significant enough to notice. I see a lot of people who are saying they haven't recovered, but a quick look at data shows they jumped from page 10 rankings to say page 3. You won't see any changes in analytics traffic. But, this is still exciting because it means that now you are no longer suppressed and work that you do to improve your site and get good links really should be recognized.
I think that there are some people still stuck in very old SEO mindsets that can't understand that SEO is no longer about making as many links as you can. The sites that I saw that had nice recoveries from Penguin were all sites that were able to truly attract good links. If your site can't get any good links then I'm afraid recovery is not likely to happen.
I do think that we'll still see some further improvements in Penguin hit sites over the next couple of weeks. Google has lifted the suppression off, but we will likely also see more improvement as Google crawls the web. But I do think that if you've seen zero improvement in keyword rankings then you shouldn't expect further big changes.
I keep hesitating to call the roll-out "finished", just because the algo flux has been all over the place. Every step of the roll-out seems to take longer than we initially though. Hopefully, we're at the end, though.
Good point on the traffic changes - you could see benefits that are just hard to measure and aren't quite as clear as the original drop-off, for many reasons. Honestly, it also just takes time for rank trackers to update and various metric to reflect changes. You could recover and not really see it in the data for a week or more.
Hey Marie, I think you have understood all the things about Penguin 4.0 so please can you tell me in "simple words" that what is new in this latest update and what we need to keep in mind for better results according to Penguin 4.0.
Many people think recovery means exactly the same serps like before. They won't accept 9th if previously was on 1st or 2nd. For me (and bet you too) it is recovery if website was nowhere and now about 1-2nd page in google.
That is so true, recovery is considered when full raking was recovered, a 10+ position lost would be considered a partial recovery for sure :)
What can I say? For example somebody has 1000 links where 600 are bad and 400 good. 400 aren't so strong to get website to the top again but it IS recovery and can't be named "partial" because there're less links than at the beginning (bad of course). Partian (imo) is when you have exact number of links (not disavowed anything - links are weak/weaker, not "bad") and are on 8th instead of 1st.
If you've recently recovered from a past Penguin update, I'd love to hear about it. A couple of follow-up questions:
(1) When were you first hit with Penguin?
(2) How complete was the recovery (full, half, etc.)?
Of course, if you were hit by a past Penguin and didn't recover, I'd be interested in hearing about that, too.
Hello Dr. Peter,
If you remember, I have tweeted you and rand both about the fluctuation in SERP, specially on 8th Oct (Mozcast was 116*) and you replied that - Best we know, removal of past Penguin demotions is still rolling out (Here is the tweet )
Now, I would like to inform you that my client's keyword got stable and he is quite happy now. The website was under penalty and his keyword went out of the Google since 2014 Penguin update. We tried hard and got removed so many bad links and now finally his main & very competitive keyword ranks on second page and even hoping to get on the first page soon.
Good thing is, since last two weeks the keyword is stable and chances are high that will move into top 10 soon. So this is what we have majored after the Penguin roll out in Sept 2016, there is chance to get more improvement if done well or doing well I guess.
What do you thing, is this because of only Penguin or something else ? Also, what do you think about the fluctuations, penguin is real time so will the SERP results keep changing/fluctuating ?
Thanks for this post, appriciate :)
According to your interest, One of my URL removed at 2 September 2016 with all of keywords and not recovered yet.
This is my URL:
www.sakhtemoon.com/list/cctv/
All other URLs have not heavy drop change.But this URL is an exception!
Hello Dr. :)
You said right Penguin is still rolling out and i according to me fluctuations start near 16-Sep, Mostly we checked our ranking in weekend but after these fluctuations i am checking ranking on daily basis and still seeing changes.
Fluctuations flow-
But personally saying still feeling like i am sitting with GOOGLE on "Sea-Saw", dont know who will WIN :(
The mid-September flucutations are a bit hard to pin down. I'm aware of at least 2-3 other algorithmic events in early-to-mid September (unconfirmed/unnamed).
We are experiencing the same issue, a lot of fluctations in august, then mid september and now recent days of november.
The first one in august was massive, the whole site went down.
Than we ranked better than before, i was excited, but this last days we suffer another massive down, not like the one in august but a half of our monitor keywords dropped 10 to 50 positions.
G.
Few of clients got hit by Penguin updates, this is when they reached out to us and have stuck with us since then.
The problem with the recovery process was that some of the clients didn't have control over link building due to the large network of affiliates they had engaged. This problem got fixed itself with roll-out of new penguin updates, as Google understood that these were HIGH domain authority sites and couldn't be penalized for spammy links, in fact we feel they evaluated for our good links instead of bad links.
We expect the same as part of Google ranking algorithm now, as Penguin becomes a part of it. I hope this helps.
High authority website can't be penalized for bad links? Because of high seo metrics?
me too
I've always heard that the older a web is and the more links has, less penalizable is. Is it true? Can you stress linkbuilding issues more and more when your web gets more and more authority?
My money's on #2 (at least I hope so) - that's it more of a gradual roll-out as part of the real-time integration than a 'sudden hit' and you either go up or go down.
One of my clients who's a long-time Penguin sufferer has 'sort of' seen a recovery. They now have the strongest rankings that I've seen in years for their main keywords, but it's been quite an underwhelming recovery - I expected a jump right to the top (more on that below), but they've only seen a bit of a jump.
Here's my client's story in a nutshell:
So either: a) Penguin 4.0 is still rolling out, and they could see higher positions yet, or b) it's finished and I over-estimated their potential recovery and/or we haven't done enough natural link building to counteract it, or c) perhaps Penguin sites - even after recovery - are still held back a bit, because of long-term trust issues. Not sure about 'c', but 'a' & 'b' are my guesses.
Follow-up - this just in: https://www.thesempost.com/google-completed-panda-r...
So... It's 'b' then.
Steve,
Our case is very, very similar to what you describe above.
But, hum, should not 'b' be '2'?
I wanted to use a different numbering system to Dr Pete so as not to confuse between his points and my points. :-)
Further clarification, as I didn't get what you were saying at first: I used 'a', 'b' & 'c' in the bottom of my first comment, which is different to Pete's 1-5. I'm guessing you didn't see that and thought my 'b' was Pete's '2'. Sorry!
Yeah, saw the tweet last night. I've been hesitant to say "It's over", because I'm still seeing a lot of fluctuation in the algorithm, and it hasn't settled down (even as if this morning). It's possible something else rolled out on the heels of Penguin, but I know the Penguin roll-out had some strange bouncing around as Google updated the various data centers. I do suspect, though, that (b) is more likely at this point. Hope for the best, but push forward on the positive work that should yield benefits regardless of Penguin.
What percentage of your link profile is supposed to be "Exact Match"?
I don't think there's a magic number/percentage, but I usually go with this: "as little as possible." ;-)
Realistically, if you want a 100% naturally-looking link profile (which is what Google would certainly prefer), then it should be 0% (or maybe <5%, as there may still be a couple of natural instances of it).
I'm sure that people get away with more than that though - and especially so if the brand/company name is a keyword (e.g. Buy Blue Widgets Online Ltd rather than Bob's Super Widget Farm Ltd)...
so what did you to for onsite seo ? Maybe that is where the problem lays ?
Whilst I love a good conspiracy, the time lines of penalty vs recovery across affected clients points to Penguins existence.
This includes a competitor who got hit by Penguin Everflux in December 14 https://www.semrush.com/uk/info/brideandgroomdirec...
The recover looks complete too, with visibility returning almost exactly to pre-penalty levels.
Don't expect to recover if you got only bad links. Still people think good link is on high authority website only. They're asking me why I marked those links as bad if tf is like 40. I'm saying it's about other footprints, anchors, content around and again "but they're on high authority websites!"...
I saw some rises but almost all were made with help of disavow tool. No idea how big impact was with that.
one of my client is having trouble with penguein. i have disavow all bad links two days ago but still there is no change in rankings. is there any faster way to recover?
Are you shall you've caught them all? Be patient, recovery can take a while, even when done right.
No signs of Improvement even after cleaning up the Link Profile for one of my clients (which was done 3-4 months back as soon as we discovered that it has been hit by Penguin) as of now. Fingers are still crossed.
Have you seen a recovery since? Let me know, please.
I agree with you backlink is one of the big part in SEO. Still I can't come back my security doors site in google search result affected by penguin.Before penguin my site ranked on 4th spot in 1st page on"Security Doors Melbourne" keyword but after penguin i lost my position. now my site is on 3rd page.I already disavow may all bad links but still i can;t see any improvement in my site. Is there any suggestion pls??
Have you still not seen an improvement? You need to take into other factors, not just Penguin.
Great breakdown Peter, thanks for sharing. Just a quick(ish) question about disavow which ties into your third point.
Prior to Penguin being updated and us learning of the new devalue feature, it is possible that some SEOs pruned their links too closely through fear of harsh demotion.
This close pruning may have resulted in some low-to-medium quality links being disavowed that were actually not a huge risk. In fact, they may have been benefitting performance.
Do you see any value in removing the disavow file completely in situations where you might have panicked and overreacted, leading to subsequent poor performance and lack of recovery?
I mean this for sites where removing the complete disavow file, or at least reducing it, is unlikely to result in manual action now, but may have resulted in Penguin demotion in the past.
Thanks!
That's an interesting question. Google's comments on disavow and the new Penguin algorithm have been a bit tough to fully decipher. Long story short, disavow isn't nearly as important to Penguin going forward, but it could have roles in other link-base algorithm or in manual actions.
I'd be hesitant to tell anyone to just up and remove their disavow file completely, but I think the idea of creating a new disavow file with a lower risk threshold and letting some of the medium-quality links back in is a reasonable one. Most likely, if those links are bad, they'll be devalued, but some could help.
I'd worry about the possible red flag of removing hundreds/thousands of disavows and Google seeing some kind of spike in avowed bad links. Even if those links are just devalued by the new Penguin, it could set off other alarms.
Thanks for your reply. That's a really great point about the consequences of suddenly avowing links and how it might look to Google.
I was listening to the Gary Illyes interview over at Marketing Land and he mentioned the concept of link labels, where a disavowed link is labelled as such. He also suggested that a sudden influx of links with real-time Penguin labels could flag the manual actions team to review.
I suppose it's not beyond reason to suggest that a sudden decrease in disavow labels could prompt similar scrutiny. It's highly likely that some site owners have actually restricted their own Penguin recovery by following previously suggested methods to avoid further penalty!
Yeah, if you're flagged for possible manual action for some reason, and then a Googler sees a ton of Penguin links and a sudden change in the disavow, it's not going to look good. Now, I'm not sure how likely that scenario is, and it probably means you have other problems in play, but it's a risk.
Disavow isn't important for penguin penalties but important for unnatural links to your website? Ok so if it's not important for penguin because "bad" links aren't "counted" then must be not important to manual unnatural links penalties too (because of "not counting" right?). People shouldn't see unnatural links to your website penalties anymore. Maybe algo but not manual.
Have anybody seen manual unnatural links to your site penalties after 1 oct?
Manual penalties aren't related to Penguin. They're designated by Google employees themselves. You still need to disavow links and request reconsideration to get a manual penalty removed.
I know but please read it again. I'm talking about if penguin discounts bad links so there'll be no manual penalties for unnatural links too (algo discounts them right?).
I´ve just suffer Pinguin 4.0 or i thing so, my url most important in my site, has gone, disappeared from google search even if i do a request in google search console :(, i almost kill myself, i do not have a manual action in the console so a i´m not 100% sure is the Penguin update. Anyway lots of thanks for the article in this momment.
If your URL isn't in the index, it's very unlikely that Penguin is the problem. Total removal of a URL could signal a technical problem, for example.
That´s it but i´ve check everything and the url, doesn´t show, it happend suddenly. :( how could i know if Penguin is or is not the problem, this happend yesterday 12, no way to know with security?. Thanks for the answer
This is probably a bit better suited for Q&A, but the thing to pin down:
(1) Is the URL indexed/cached at all?
(2) If "yes", is the URL ranking on any long-tail terms?
(3) If "yes", is the URL ranking on head terms?
If (1) and (2) are "yes", but (3) is "no", you're probably dealing with something more like a devaluation or general authority issue. If (2) is "no", but (1) is "yes" you could be in penalty territory. If (1) is "no", it's more likely technical. This is all, of course, a vast oversimplification.
Thanks again for the replay, the URL complete dissapear, i try to crawl several times from google search console, or i try to ping, it´s not ranking for any long tail term and neither to head tearms, it´s an article for SEO local, but i didn´t took anything, suddenly yesterday dissapear, and it was my url with more links to it (with exception of home). (PD: sorry for my english, i´m spanish)
what actions did you take? (Dont worry im sapnish too
Surprising now everything is not ok, I DON´T UNDERSTAND NOTHING, :) but i´m happy, SEO is kind of magic, i get back my database to 1 day ago, to have same configuration in my site.
this can be negative seo, panda, or other thing content related. Lately I removed negseo and client got back on track. what do you see after site:domain.com?
Thanks for shared peter. Penguin is a mistery. Great article.
Good luck everybody
no need to DT tool, in my opinion all you need is to get high quality, but really good links with brand / url anchor.
Webmatertool updates too slowly on bad links. I used disavow. But it takes a long time, My website of recovery. But it no longer rank as before.
We absolutely did not recover at all and we still see big mass drop down in our SERP positions, here just an example:
Search Console last drops
G.
The timing of this and couple with a massive drop my websites ahrefs ranking would suggest I have been hit heavily with this too. Are there any quick and easy ways to recover from this?
[Link removed by editor.]
You are right, lots of website didn't recovered from peguin update due to voilation of google spam, alough my wesite recovered from update because i removed the spamy inbound links, so those websites who removed the toxic links from thier website, only they will get the benefits of the this ipdate.
each time when ever penguin launched my website was improved i ranking. They only reason was instead of focusing upon so many links i prefer getting links from very high profile websites, less ancor texts and balanced between nofollow and dofollow links. This way recovery is also easy and rapid.
Great, In-depth article. Thanks.
Penguin 4.0 is real time, so you have no longer to wait for recovery from penguin 4.0 just stop doing the spam activity clear your websites bad links and you automatically see improvement in your ranking when next time Google crawls the website. Its page specific and do not hurt your whole website if you are creating spam links.
Nice article and well described. Thanks pete
No significant changes in ranking observed so far. However a few keywords of old websites have improved slightly. There are many scrap websites are still in search results.
I have fallen to the bottom in the SERPs and can not recover: /
Not sure what are the ways to recover, but I read an article that says some SEOs are noticing the recoveries with Penguin 4.0. Here's the article https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-4-recoveries-22792.html
this can be anything. penguin, panda, thin content, negseo or code messed up.
Did you take time over paid links?
valuable article for Search engine optimization, thanks for sharing
Penguin did not affect significantly the Arab sites.
For example, My Site wounded two years ago but I did not find any output from the update
[Link removed by editor.]
Thanks for really awesome post Dr. Peter J. Meyers,
My web site was in the good ranking in main ("web tasarım") & derivatives keywords and then after 3-5 september my rankings is down (not in first 10 pages) .
My contents are unique, backlink profile is clean and detoxed and most of the onpage criterias are done. i am still searching, why i dropped down, but still couldnt solve the problem. Any idea, and alternative suggestions for what can i do about it?
I had a big dent in the webmaster tools, complete recovery after 2 weeks.