Confirmed: Google Penguin 3.0 released late Friday Night (17th October)

[Robert Charlton]

Per Barry, it's now official, but details still forthcoming...

Confirmed: Google Penguin 3.0 Released Late Friday Night
updated midday Sun Oct 19, 2014
by Barry Schwartz
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-3-19313.html [seroundtable.com]

Update & Confirmed: Google Sunday afternoon has confirmed they have done a Penguin update. I am trying to get more details at this moment.

From Barry's original report, dated Oct 18...

Special Report: Google Penguin 3.0 Likely Released Saturday Morning

I am working on getting confirmation from Google but I have never seen the forums light up as much as they are now...

...It is unclear if this is a refresh to the Penguin algorithm or a revised algorithm update. Again, I am waiting to get more details from Google on this.

But it seems like 90%+ of SEOs are in agreement that Google refreshed Penguin over the weekend. Will they reverse it? Was it a test? Will it stick? That is the big question.

PS: Thanks to member elguiri for spotting this in the Google Updates thread [webmasterworld.com...]

[Shepherd]

Well, guess we got all the recovery we're going to get last year, no improvement with this update. Time to start building links again, what time is it in India?

[JesterMagic]

Great going Google. All my real competitors (with quality content like mine) are gone and I get pushed mostly to the second page.

Replaced (over the last year) with large info sites that touch on every topic with fluff pieces, useless Facebook pages and niche sites that are spam sites or sites that participate in blog networks (easy to spot if you do a little digging).

I really hope this is a gradual Penguin rollout and will see better results in a few days.

I can't remember with Penguin. Do they update the algo first then the data or both at the same time?

[edited by: JesterMagic at 9:35 pm (utc) on Oct 19, 2014]

[SnowMan68]

Shepard, are you in the usa?

[Shepherd]

yes, us, ecom

[Catalyst]

I was just coming to share the news too. Have been seeing chatter all weekend. So it's good to have confirmation that this update is Penguin.

[Wilburforce]

I'm glad John Mueller told us they were taking trouble to get it right: I wouldn't have known that from the look of it.

[RedBar]

Oh my lord what a mess!

For my widgets I am seeing:

1. Loads of quality sites wiped out.

2. Many replaced by generic supply sites, forum boards, social and image posting scrapers.

BUT the worst result I have seen so far is for a keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 search and 27/30 results are spam Nike sites using those words...utterly bizarre.

Let's see how long this takes to settle since it looks awful, and mostly useless, at the moment for my widgets.

[souvik_2002]

2 sites that I have been monitoring closely shows Google cached results from the 6th and 8th October. Yesterday these cached dates were 11th and 12th October.

Possible a test rollout from old data, expect a data refresh as both sites went down several pages.

[Shepherd]

That's interesting Souvik (and welcome to WebmasterWorld)

Just checked a couple of our sites/landing pages. One has the cache date of October 10th and the other is October 12th. Neither have seen any movement post penguin 3.

[souvik_2002]

Thank you @Shepherd

[seoskunk]

I don't know about this update, not sure its finished rolling out but early signs are that Google did indeed process your disavow file straight into their recycle bin.

I think a lot of SME's have been waiting for this update and will be disappointed by it. But its still early days maybe it will improve tomorrow. It will be interesting the reaction to it if it doesn't improve. Many people I think were hanging on waiting for their sites to recover may just switch off advertising. After all a year is a long time to wait for a recovery that doesn't happen.

Finding alternative means of traffic will become key in the coming months with google crowded advertising market increasingly becoming impossible for roi.

I'll be spending ad budgets in a different way in the future for sites that failed to recover - Amazon and Ebay for shopping, with twitter,facebook,linkedin for social ads and Yahoo Bing for search. All funded from the money that used to go to google.

[Robert Charlton]

Cache dates and index dates don't necessarily align. Particularly during a time of a big update like this, I'd expect them to be all over the map.

Cache Date Vs Index Date
Feb, 2011
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4272048.htm [webmasterworld.com]

The database used for generating the snippet, the database of content used for deciding ranking/placement, the database used for showing the title, and the data stored for showing the supposedly "cached" page are all updated at different times, and are almost never in sync.

...index date and cache date can be quite disconnected.

For this update, it's likely even more complicated, as data was "frozen" for the update on a particular date.

The above discussion, I should note, was three and a half years back... but I guessing that the disconnection between serps display and ranking still holds.

[Shepherd]

Cache dates and index dates don't necessarily align

I'll defer to you on this Robert, don't know much about it myself, just posting the data I have. Be curious to here from a penguinized site that recovered with this update to see what the ranking page's cache date is.

[seoskunk]

I think they froze data taken between the 10th to 14th of October based on cache dates of sites I have seen recovered and penalised.

I think this update will probably continue to roll out for a while. A new google dance I guess.

[SnowMan68]

Just blows my mind that they would wait a year, then release it and not "really" do anything to the usa serps/index. It just seems fishy. I have a feeling this week is going to be pretty interesting in the usa.

[Purposeinc]

We saw a 10% drop in organic traffic on a very white hat, large eCommerce site on last Monday, October 13. Did anyone see any changes earlier than Friday?

[getcooking]

Did anyone see any changes earlier than Friday?

Yep, I reported big changes earlier in the week also. I've been seeing nonstop fluctuations in the keywords I watch - ever since Monday. Big flux too, not just the normal 1-2 positions. Seeing really weird things overall (and this is not a site hit by Penguin)

[abdul]

there is no positive or negative effect on my projects. (in-house or client based)

[zapmachine]

mid sized niche ecom site affected by penguin 1 finally making a massive recovery, at least from organic serps. fingers crossed it sticks. good luck everyone.

[diddlydazz]

as far as i can see the penguin update/refresh/whatever has coincided with a panda data push (+/-36 hours).

checking numerous data centres (UK spelling :o) ) and datasets, for me at least, confirm this.

on another note, i think a lot of WMs who were expecting something from this penguin iteration and got nothing should be looking at Panda-related issues not penguin.

another IMHO, disavow data was part of this update/refresh/whatever but WMs need to realise that for every link you disavow something needs to replace it. disavowing a hundred (sh*t/low quality) links means you have to replace those links with around 27 (real/unsolicited) editorial IBLs. (the 27% is based on personal tests of a fairly large dataset)

also, from what the data i have tells me, the effect of negative SEO has been slightly eradicated with this update/refresh/whatever. i carried out controlled tests with 2-year old domains and things look hopeful.

in summary, i have been dismayed with the big G over the last several years as many here have been, but this update looks a little more *content* driven. let G blend its ads with organics but hopefully it (and its board) will see that the only way to retain its market share is by providing better organic results. this update *seems* to be a step in that direction. with the caveat that some will still feel "beaten-up" and i have been there (and had to lay-off staff) so i empathise

[Robert Charlton]

Cache dates and index dates don't necessarily align

...just posting the data I have.

Thanks, Shepherd. That's pretty much all I can do as well. For the record... most pages I'm seeing right now online are showing cache dates ranging from Oct 9 to 13, with Oct 10 to Oct 12 being the most common. So, it's likely that there's been a fairly full respidering of the web.... It's not yet clear how far Google has gone with the data.

My comment about data "freeze" referred to this comment by Gary Illyes of Google, reported in SearchEngineLand, in our discussion about John Mueller's estimates of when Penguin 3.0 would go live [webmasterworld.com...]

Gary also said that if you disavow bad links now or as of about two weeks ago, it will likely be too late for this next Penguin refresh. But Gary added that the Penguin refreshes will be more frequent because of the new algorithm in place.

So, as I'm seeing it, Google has had the data they're using for this update for at least two weeks, and they've probably been testing and tweeking the algorithm on a small number of data centers until they were satisfied enough to release it wide, which was late this Friday.


In discussing "recovery" I think it would be helpful to have brief comments on what various members here who have recovered (or not recovered) have done in addition to disavow. As many of us have discussed, more than disavow by itself would likely be needed to help a site "recover".

This would probably mean additional content and promotion, designed to result in more natural backlinks, though this would vary depending on the situation of the individual site. John Mueller gave some strong hints of the broader view in a Google Product Forums post I quoted in this thread...

Google confirms Penguin recovery requires algorithm refresh
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4700685.htm [webmasterworld.com]

...John Mueller... suggests that a site that has really begun fixing its spam issues might see a benefit before the data/algorithm refresh....

Direct link to John's post...
[productforums.google.com...]

In practice, a site is never in a void alone with just a single algorithm. We use over 200 factors in crawling, indexing, and ranking. While there are some cases where a site is strongly affected by a single algorithm, that doesn't mean that it won't see any changes until that algorithm or its data is refreshed. For example, if a site is strongly affected by a web-spam algorithm, and you resolve all of those web-spam issues and work to make your site fantastic, you're likely to see changes in search even before that algorithm or its data is refreshed. Some of those effects might be directly related to the changes you made (other algorithms finding that your site is really much better), some of them might be more indirect (users loving your updated site and recommending it to others).

... (it) helps to keep in mind here is that you shouldn't be focusing on individual factors of individual algorithms, it makes much more sense to focus on your site overall -- cleaning up individual issues, but not assuming that these are the only aspects worth working on.

I'm assuming that most who didn't work on the site overall but just disavowed bad links aren't going to see much recovery.

What's probably going to be most confusing and most discouraging for many, though, are situations where members did work on their sites overall but didn't see recovery.

[chrisv1963]

No change for my main website (yet), which is positive.

Unfortunately known link buyers (guys who emailed me in the past and asked to buy a link) are still ranking. The same goes for the Pinterest pages with scraped content.

[MrSavage]

I might look at my stats now.

[GreyBeard123]

In my part of the world, on page one/two, I mostly see sites from US and UK… Most of the local/regional sites disappeared.

But we are very lucky as some of our sites are now ranking in both the US and Israel :(

How can local sites be too spammy for local/regional search but not spammy enough to rank for other continents?

[Wilburforce]

situations where members did work on their sites overall but didn't see recovery

Which, so far, applies to me.

However, apart from the departure of an EMD from page 1 I mentioned in an earlier post, nothing seems to have moved at all for my key term (or for the other main terms I monitor), so maybe my sector has yet to catch up.

[kellyman]

My site dropped like a stone, and heres what i think

I had a unnatural link warning back in early 2013, the site is only a local site with only 64 referring domains, I cleaned this up and got the penalty revoked, the site did not recover.

So knowing i had a clean site with no further link building going on i 301 to another domain and the site responded well and stayed stable for the last 14-16 months

this update killed me again so i believe that it has something to do with 301's in place..

Way too early to tell

[Wilburforce]

...or so I thought.

On checking by location (myservice nearby-town), my site is now at #1 for surrounding towns, but has dropped to #2 for myservice mytown, and to #4 for myservice nearest-town.

Possibly having my actual location in content and organic backlinks looks spammy to Google. It is a pity I couldn't think of any synonyms for where my business is.

[GreyBeard123]

this update killed me again so i believe that it has something to do with 301's in place..

I’m speculating, but I don’t think so; 301’s are rather natural occurrences and I’m seeing sites that rank very well with 301’s...

[Beachboy]

One of the sites now ranking ahead of my site for, uhhhh, widget services, is the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition for widget services.

Seriously, Google?

You think this is an improvement?