Google Penguin

Google Penguin (also called Penguin update ) refers to a published in 2012 update of the algorithm of the search engine Google. This depends, among other things, to be very optimized websites, such as may occur in the course of search engine optimization.

History

Penguin became active on April 24, first time in 2012. On May 25, 2012 followed by a small update in October of the same year a further update was performed. Google assigns Penguin version numbers starting with 1.0. The minor updates have consecutive numbers to Penguin 1.3.

A major adjustment with the name Penguin 2.0 on 22 May 2013. According to Matt Cutts and Google around 2.3 % of U.S. search queries were affected. On 24 February 2012, at which the first Penguin update was performed, it was even about 3.1 % for searches in English and about 3 % of inquiries in languages ​​such as German, Chinese and Arabic.

Effects

A search engine such as Google's goal is to prevent the manipulation of results, and in particular their position. For this reason, the exact variables of the search algorithm are unknown. According to Matt Cutts, head of Google webspam teams, especially the content of the website is relevant for a good ranking. Nevertheless, the ranking can be artificially enhanced. One possibility is doing the on-page optimization. The content, format and source code are optimized so that Google can read the website better. Another method is to generate back links ( backlinks ), as practiced in the off-page optimization.

About Optimized Web sites are to be penalized by Google Penguin. This can be done by lowering the rankings in the search results to the complete removal of the website from the search index. The exact parameters with which Google Penguin works are not known. In the April 24, 2012 announced the update statement but that keyword stuffing and unnatural link patterns were mentioned as criteria for detecting Web spam concrete. According to Google, about 3 % of all search queries are affected by the update.

Previous Updates

In February 2011, Google released an update, which was known as the Google Panda later. This update was aimed at websites with low quality content. Another update was released in November 2011. Means "Google Freshness" the relevance of a website should be more involved in the placement. According to Google, 35 percent of all search queries were affected by this update.