In 2012, in April, Google officially launched a “website spam algorithm update”, which specifically targeted bad backlinks and illegitimate backlink building strategies to manipulate search results.

The spam algorithm (officially) became Google’s Penguin Algorithm Update via a tweet from Matt Cutts, who was then the head of Google’s webspam team. While Google has officially named the algorithm Penguin, there is no official word on the origin or cause of this name.

During the past seven years we have learned a lot about Google Penguin. Some call it “modernization” and others call it “punishment.” Whatever you decide to call it, Google Penguin has changed the way we look at Google search results. Google Penguin is one of the 200 factors Google uses to determine the ranking of sites.

All updates google penguin

Google has released several Google Penguin algorithm updates since it was launched in 2012, and possibly a number of other tweaks that have gone into the registry as unknown algorithm updates.

1. Google Penguin 1.1 Update: March 2012
2. Google Penguin 1.2 Update: October 2012
3. Google Penguin 2.0 Update: May 2013
4. Google Penguin 2.1 Update: October 2013
5. Google Penguin 3.0 Update: October 2014
6. Google Penguin 4.0 Update: September 2016

When Google released the latest update for Google Penguin in September 2016, Google officially announced that the Google Penguin update is now time and will now be entered into the main Google algorithm, and there will be no more major updates. This means that there is no longer any waiting for updates to happen, the changes will happen faster and without being announced.

How does Google Penguin work?

Google Penguin targets sites that have created spam backlinks in an attempt to manipulate Google results and achieve a higher ranking. Google’s algorithm scores every website on the Internet by many different ranking factors. Some of these types are well known such as site speed and HTTPs, and some other less known factors. To give you an idea of ​​what kind of backlinks Google Penguin targets, here are some examples of bad backlinks:

• Backlinks are from low quality sites
• It turns out that it was built through backlink publishing bots
• Purchased links
• Build a large number of backlinks in a short period of time
• Links from questionable countries

As Google crawls each of the backlinks built sites, Penguin scores it based on quality. If you hit a low enough limit, your site will be penalized until you can clean it up.

And how Google Penguin works is to look at the “Link Charts” section of the Google Webmaster Guidelines. They detail the types of links that may negatively affect your site:

• Buy or sell links
• exchange links
• Sponsored Links
• Ads with visitor tracking links
• Links in the footer or templates (site level)

It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out what “negative influence” means. If you have enough of these links pointing back to your site, you will likely lose your ranking in Google.

How to Restore Your Rank After a Google Penguin Penalty

Google recommends using disavow tool As a last resort to dealing with bad links, getting rid of links is a lot easier (and a faster process in terms of impact) than sending reconsideration requests.

What should be included in the Disavow file

A disavow file is a file that you send to Google that tells them to ignore all links in the file so that they have no effect on your site. The result is that negative links will not cause a drop in your site’s ranking, like Penguin but it also means that if you accidentally include high-quality links in your disavow file, those links will not help your ranking but rather negatively affect it.

There is no need to include any notes in the disclaimer file. Just include links only.

Google does not read any of the codes you created in the disavow file as it processes them automatically without anyone reading them. Some find it useful to add internal notations such as the date a set of links were added to the disavow file or comments about their attempts to reach the webmaster in order to remove the link.

Once you download the disavow file, Google will send you a confirmation. But even though Google will process them right away it won’t immediately downgrade these links. Therefore, your results will not improve immediately after submitting the disclaimer file.

There is no way to find out which links Google has deleted from their index and which have not since you will not notice any change in Webmaster Tools.

If you previously submitted a disclaimer file to Google, it will replace the old file with your new file, not add to it. It is therefore important to ensure that if you have previously rejected links, you must include those links in your new disclaimer file. You can always upload a copy of the current disclaimer file into Google Search Console.

Learn more about: File malicious backlink disavow

Disavow individual links or main domain

It is preferable to choose to disavow the main domain instead of the internal page link.

But there are some cases in which individual links must be disavowed individually, and this is in the case if there is a site that contains a mixture of quality, meaning that it contains pages of value that you will benefit from and pages that you have links to but cause damage to your site.

Google only needs to crawl one page of the site in order for that link to be discounted to your site.

If you implement the exclusion process on the basis of the domain, do not worry whether you list the site as having www or without www as the domain-based disavowal will take this into account.

Find backlinks

If you suspect that your site has been negatively affected by Google Penguin, you need to perform a link review and remove or disavow any low quality links.

Webmaster Tools includes a list of backlinks your site has obtained, but be aware that it also includes links that have already been deleted. The problem with Web Master Tools is that it is very slow compared to other tools like Ahrefs.

Monitoring backlinks is an essential task that you must give some time as the competition is fierce and attacks can occur on your site. That’s when a competitor buys spam links and directs them to your site.

Many people use “negative SEO” methods to destroy competing sites and degrade their ranking and thus lead their sites. However, Google stated that they are well aware of this when it happens, so don’t worry about this issue.

This also means that proactively using the disavow feature without explicit indication of a penalty or notification of manual action is a good idea.