The latest update to the Google algorithm has been named Google Penguin and went live on the 24/04/2012. It has had a huge effect on the SEO world both in terms of rankings and in terms of link strategies. It has now been 6 weeks since Penguin first went live so let’s have a look at its effects.

Google updates are nothing new and have happened for years. The first big Google update was Google Florida back in 2003, then it was Google Panda which went live in 2009 and now it’s Google Penguin. Like any program, these are constantly updated and refined.

Google Penguin has been dubbed the over optimisation penalty and has been designed to improve Google’s search results and to minimise spam and results in a demotion penalty.

Google Penguin works similarly to Google Panda and is an algorithmic filter. It is not a manual penalty and therefore you will not receive a penalty notification in Google Web Master Tools. It only runs once a month on or around the 25th of each month. As a result, the minimum time a Google Penguin penalty will apply to a site is 1 month and will continue until the problems with the site is fixed.

As there has only been one update so far, the exact factors of Google Penguin are not known, though the following observations have been noticed by the Marketing Grin team:

• It is not a site wide penalty and it affects specific pages more than others
• It affects sites with a low anchor text diversity
• It affects sites with a high percentage of exact match anchors
• It is more prevalent in competitive niches

Whilst on page factors have been mentioned a lot, we have not seen any evidence of this. We have also not seen specific evidence to suggest a certain type of link building has been hit specifically, although certainly sites like Build My Rank were shut down at a similar time.

Ways to correct any penalties

• Make sure all of your content is unique with canonical tags to prevent others from copying it
• Make sure all of your links have links going to them. A site with lots of poor quality links looks spammy
• Create good quality links with long, partial match anchor texts. Natural links will have a diverse, partial match anchor text
• Get some good quality, .edu and .gov links to build domain authority and trust
• Don’t use any automation software directly to your site