What is Penguin 4 Update?

What is Penguin 4 Update?

Penguin 4 (also known as Penguin 2.0) was released on May 22, 2013 and affected 2.3% of queries. Penguin 5 (also known as Penguin 2.1) was released on October 4, 2013, affected around 1% of queries, and has been the most recent of the Google Penguin algorithm updates.

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On September 23, 2016 Google announced that Google Penguin was now part of the core algorithm meaning that it updates in real time. Hence there will not longer be announcements by Google relating to future refreshes. Real-time also means that websites are evaluated in real-time and rankings impacted in real-time. During the last years webmasters instead always had to wait for the roll-out of the next update to get out of a Penguin penalty. Also, Google Penguin 4.0 is more granular as opposed to previous updates, since it may affect a website on a URL-basis as opposed to always affecting a whole website. Finally, Penguin 4.0 differs from previous Penguin versions since it does not demote a web site when it finds bad links. Instead it discounts the links, meaning it ignores them and they no longer count toward the website's ranking. As a result of this, there is less need to use the disavow file. Google uses both algorithm and human reviewers to identify links that are unnatural, manipulative or deceptive and includes these in its Manual Actions report for websites.

Penguin 4.0 is the real time update for Google. 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 4.0 has changed all of this. Now, Penguin refreshes in real-time, which means that site penalties are incurred or lifted whenever Google crawls and reindexes a page. In other words, building spammy links could burn your SERPs tomorrow, but you no longer have to wait for ages for a penalty to be lifted.