Google's Gary Illyes Indicates the Next Penguin Update Will be the Last

[engine]

Whilst we all wait for the next Penguin update, Penguin 4.0, Google's Gary Illyes has indicated that this may be the last of such updates and it may, finally, be integrated to a real-time update.
Judge for yourself as it's never clear, nor is the date of the update clear. We'll just have to continue waiting.

[twitter.com...]

[martinibuster]

People who knowingly spammed got what they knew were coming to them so no concern for those, they take care of themselves.

However, updates that takes several months are cruel to the businesses who are victims of poor advice, misinformed or shoddy consultants and to those who are small mom and pop amateurs who were making it up as they went along.

[Ebuzz]

However, updates that takes several months are cruel to the businesses who are victims of poor advice, misinformed or shoddy consultants and to those who are small mom and pop amateurs who were making it up as they went along.

If you are referring to the long awaited Penguin 4, it has been 1.5 years so far, since the last update. A very long time and no end in sight. Now that's cruel....to make people wait an eternity for a shot at redemption.

[EditorialGuy]

Now that's cruel....to make people wait an eternity for a shot at redemption.

On the other hand, it's benefiting people who didn't try to trick Google's algorithm. For every loser, there's a winner.

[engine]

it's benefiting people who didn't try to trick Google's algorithm.

I think it's worth noting, as Martinibuster said, that not everyone tried to trick Google and were either unfortunate to be caught up, or were given bad advice by an SEO which caused their site to tank.
If it wasn't deliberate, it's still a long time to be in jail without a fair trial.

[Andy Langton]

If it wasn't deliberate, it's still a long time to be in jail without a fair tria

Exactly - I've seen a number of smaller business owners who simply hired the wrong people. It's unfair to suggest that they should be involved enough (and understand) the minutiae of SEO sufficiently to monitor, for instance, where links were coming from. In many cases, they're never even told, so the thousands of outsourced backlinks would only be found by them personally signing up to one of the major link-monitoring tools. That's not a reasonable thing to expect, IMO.

[dethfire]

There are others like me who manage a very large highly moderated forum. A few years back a spammer sneakily injected a spam link into a post. Then proceeded to spam literally thousands of other websites with a link to the thread with the spam link. I am certain I have paid a heavy price for this POS spammer..

[aristotle]

The penguin part of the algorithm has always been problematic. It grew out of google's frustration with its continuing inability to effectively fight spammers, and in some ways resembled a wild attempt at a last-resort knockout punch.

The punch staggered the spammers and made it much harder for them. But it also penalized the sites of a lot of innocent people, and in addition created an opportunity for negative SEO.

Most likely the long delays between updates are due to the attempts to fix the problems.

[smilie]

>> EditorialGuy: On the other hand, it's benefiting people who didn't try to trick Google's algorithm. For every loser, there's a winner.

Oh, please, spare us some socialist stories.
There's 10 spots on page 1. 6 ot 7 now taken by either Google or their partners. So you are shooting at 3 out of what, 1-2 million? And now usually against thousands of companies including billion dollar corps and very well funded startups with designated marketing-SEO teams. Not only that, Pengiun and Panda made so many death traps it is nearly inevitable a small bus site would step or get trapped into one.

De facto. Statistically impossible for a small bus. to compete.

I guess I need to re-read this forum again yet, why on late April suddenly our traffic went down 50% within a week. Assuming new Penguin is finishing off what's left of small businesses and mom-and-pops?

[Andy Langton]

De facto. Statistically impossible for a small bus. to compete.

It's not statistically impossible for a small business to compete. This is simply untrue. I also think you are overstating the value of typical "designated marketing-SEO teams".

Pengiun and Panda made so many death traps it is nearly inevitable a small bus site would step or get trapped into one.

This statement is much too bold. You're citing very specific algorithms that did not affect the majority of sites. You're also citing Panda which specifically targeted sites run by aggressive start-ups.

[smilie]

Andy Langton, let me give you concrete examples.

I had 5 - yes FIVE - friends , three with million dollar online businesses. 2013 - death and destruction. One person went on to do sales on eBay and Amazon ,and he's dead now because Amazon kicks merchants to the curb just as well Google. One person barely sold his for 30c on the dollar. One person is still in business, thinking to go back to work. One is happy he never tried to quit his IT manager level job. One moved on into SEO. I am the only pure play left barely standing.

In my niche. Since 2008, 80% of offline went out of business due to real estate collapse. In 2013 , 80% of online is also barely surviving, whoever had the dexterity and offline customers (that's old bus and this isn't mom-and-pop) slowly getting into the niche. GE and several mega oligarch companies is buying up everybody who's anybody. Several acquisitions at the level of $10-20 million. Several that were $5-10 mil are now $1-3 mil. These are not mom-and-pop, yet they are dying. People who had sites with online sales, kinda use it, who don't and who are not out of business increased real business activities, such as conferences.

It is to a point where ecommerce , for instance, isn't even now considered by an average mom-and-pop. Because it is too complex and requires hiring (even if it is part time) a good: site developer, designer, Seo person, marketing person, content person, mobile person, social media person, etc. etc. << this isn't a possibility of a mom-and-pop shop anymore, sorry Google kings killed the golden goose.

I am mom and pop, I am a pop doing everything in tech and SEO myself. It is very doom-like out there.

[Roaming Gnome]

Its true was smilie said. A lot of businesses have consolidated and other just simply folded.

I for one stopped pulling my hair out wondering if the next update would be the death knell. Google giveth and taketh away... Instead of focusing on appeasing one traffic stream I went out and created others. Whatever I get from G, I happily accept, but combing forums and retooling my site for one entity took too much time. I lost focus and it almost wrecked my business.

[Ebuzz]

I would not be surprised at all if the Penguin never comes this year. I have seen threads where people were posting on forums around the time of the 1st Penguin asking what went wrong with Google and why all their favorite sites are gone. And many of the responses were hating on Google even back then and recommending other search engines....saying Google was crap, etc. These were not webmasters, just ordinary people who wondered what went wrong with Google.

That's the extent of the impact. Are they really still trying to fix today, what went wrong that day?

[tangor]

Google will eventually do the shooting of one's foot with this constant (and oddly bizarre) attempt to "fine tune" the user experience (that's code for something other than user experience, we just don't know what that is!). Over the years the value of g serps has fallen, by bits and pieces to the extent that even the average user can tell the difference. Bing is picking up those folks, and while B might be "fine tuning" their algos as well they are not usually deadly to those who at least make an effort to play the game straight.

[smilie]

>> Ebuzz: I would not be surprised at all if the Penguin never comes this year. I have seen threads where people were posting on forums around the time of the 1st Penguin asking what went wrong with Google

Let me explain what Penguin does, in essence. It is time for an average to realize this to understand why you are at a random wish of G gods.

Pengiun, in essence, allows algos to add negative scores to links.

Think about this for a while.

An average Mom-And-Pop business (MAP), say, has 1000 ok links , some of them good and they have + scores. Some of them bad that Google used to ignore. Now Google gives some of them -.

Here comes a spammer that scrapes Google or any other SE to auto generate with a single click of a button a bunch of sites. And our MAP was good, followed Google's guidelines for good sites and has their keywords in Title. So spammer scrapes titles and makes them links. Now all of a sudden, MAP site has thousands of links pointing to them with a KW. Snap! and Penguin ate them, a naughty spammer.

Even if you assign -0.01 to each negative link. And spammer auto generated within minutes 10,000 links. You are at 10,000*-0.01 = -100. Now you need to generate hundreds of + links (none of them can be +1 , maybe +0.1 or +0.2) so you need 500-1000 positive links to offset this.

IF (a big if) MAP understands this and hires an SEO firm to offset Google's auto generated negative scores, there's no guarantees at all. SEO can also auto generate spam, step into Google's traps, etc. AND you can't make than 100 links per month anyway as you'd trip another Google's anti-spam algo and be immediately dead. And tomorrow there can be another scraper auto-generating another 10,000 negative links, although this is unlikely while MAP site is in Google ban as it isn't showing, but very likely as soon as it is again in the top 10-20 SERPs.

Even if you understand this, there's no easy way out. And mines are everywhere for an average MAP to not be able to handle this.

That's why after this dumb idea of negative link weights actually passed, and for a year of doom and complete small business destruction, G not canceled Penguin but came up with a cover inside Webmaster Tools, "unnatural links".

Look guys, you destroyed small business , and gave everyone additional job tracking their own links and guessing how G scores them. The least what you can do is to cancel negative links weights idea, thank you, so people can at least breathe.

So mom-and-pop don't have another PhD-in-statistics level job added to 5 others they already need to run their mom-and-pop online business.

[Ebuzz]

@ Smilie

Yes, the problem started when Google attached a negative score to what it considered bad links, rather than just ignoring them like what it always used to do.

Whoever came up with this hair-brained idea will have to live with the karmic consequences. A lot of lives were affected - negatively.

[smilie]

@Ebuzz , exacto.

And the cover-up with FUD they are producing is enormous. Which tells you it is one of hire-ups, maybe C level, who made the decision. Who needs to be either fired or "promoted" ;-) to make this go away.

[JS_Harris]

Lets face it, Penguin penalized a whole lot of site owners that weren't doing anything wrong.

Example: Webmasters who have topics that are image intensive took to a wordpress plugin that allowed the conversion of posts into slides(which users loved). Unfortunately the plugin used the 'nextpage' tag and created a new url per slide so suddenly one page became many low content similar pages(in the eyes of Google, not the end user). GREAT user experience, especially on mobile since there was no need to scroll down, but very vulnerable to Penguin.

The effect was even worse if clicking on an image loaded yet another unique url just for the image. Again, users did not see this as spam but suddenly each URL can't stand on its own vs Penguin.

I wonder if Penguin is actually being deprecated now that Rankbrain is the incumbent to run the show, after backlink totals are tallied of course.

[EditorialGuy]

Webmasters who have topics that are image intensive took to a wordpress plugin that allowed the conversion of posts into slides(which users loved). Unfortunately the plugin used the 'nextpage' tag and created a new url per slide so suddenly one page became many low content similar pages(in the eyes of Google, not the end user). GREAT user experience, especially on mobile since there was no need to scroll down, but very vulnerable to Penguin.

Great user experience, maybe, but what about the search experience? That's probably the bigger issue for Google.

[aristotle]

Great user experience, maybe, but what about the search experience? That's probably the bigger issue for Google.

A "search experience" is what you experience when trying to use google, and these days it's often a bad experience.

[3zero]

Webmasters who have topics that are image intensive took to a wordpress plugin that allowed the conversion of posts into slides(which users loved). Unfortunately the plugin used the 'nextpage' tag and created a new url per slide so suddenly one page became many low content similar pages(in the eyes of Google, not the end user). GREAT user experience, especially on mobile since there was no need to scroll down, but very vulnerable to Penguin.

The effect was even worse if clicking on an image loaded yet another unique url just for the image. Again, users did not see this as spam but suddenly each URL can't stand on its own vs Penguin.

I think your talking about thin content here and thats more likely to fall under the Panda Algo.

[glakes]

Google favors their own properties, their investments and those early investors in their company (Amazon). Penguin, just like Panda, is nothing more than an excuse to favor their own interests above competition.

[optimusprimed]

I for one hope Google is broken up. It has become a monster and everyone is dependent upon it. We all jump through hoops on a daily basis for Google. Yes, we need them, but what a price to pay. It's like selling your soul to the devil. "Don't be evil" - what a joke!