What We Know About Penguin Update 3.0

What we know is this update only affected less than 1% of English queries.  Although everyone was looking for a big drop for specific sites and vertical known for unsavory practices, this hasn’t  been the case yet.   The original roll out of Penguin seemed to be the main penalization effect based on a type of filter catching things which  is what it was created to do.  That filter gets refined over time in what it catches and what it lets through.  I personally have not noticed any organic traffic down tick on a site or a page level.  Rankings have somewhat remained the same in the portfolio of clients we represent as well as associated tracked rankings have not seen any major fluctuations.  The hope with a new Penguin update for SEO practitioners has been that sites that were hit by previous Penguin issues that were fixed would rebound as a new update was rolled out, and that has not been the case either.   The hope in looking at data to try to measure any changes, is that it should demote sites with bad link profiles that up until now have slipped through the crack, and help the sites that were initially hit and have cleaned up their link profile. Since the frequency of updates was fairly long in duration about a year to be exact, updates may be rolling out on a more regular basis to Penguin in the coming months and perhaps then previous hit sites will begin the recovery process.  Google confirmed the roll out date was October 17th, 2014.  This has been the sixth major Penguin update over time.  The key to staying on Penguin’s good side is being ethical and future proofing your digital marketing efforts.