Penguin is now part of our core algorithm

Friday, September 23, 2016

Google’s algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals or “clues” that make it possible to
surface what you might be looking for. These signals include things like the specific words that
appear on websites, the freshness of content, your region and PageRank. One specific signal of the
algorithms is called
Penguin,
which was first launched in 2012 and today has an update.

After a period of development and testing, we are now rolling out an update to the Penguin
algorithm in all languages. Here are the key changes you’ll see, which were also among webmasters’
top requests to us:

• Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was
  periodically refreshed at the same time. Once a webmaster considerably improved their site and
  its presence on the internet, many of Google’s algorithms would take that into consideration
  very fast, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed. With this change, Penguin’s data
  is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect
  shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we’re not going to comment on future
  refreshes.
• Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on
  spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.

The web has significantly changed over the years, but as we said in our
original post, webmasters
should focus on creating amazing, compelling websites. It’s also important to remember
that updates like Penguin are just one of more than 200 signals we use to determine rank.

As always, if you have feedback, you can reach us on our
forums and on
Twitter.

Posted by Gary Illyes,
Google Search Ranking Team