Every year, search engine giant Google changes its algorithm about 500-600 times. While some are just minor changes, they occasionally roll out major updates that affect the search results in a way or the other. While the Google Panda update, launched in February 2011 was meant to stop the sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results, the Penguin 3.0 release came unannounced from the search engine office that left many website owners baffled and confused. With this algorithm they have tried to demote a site that has a poor backlink profile.
Some of the things that have been clearly pointed out with this update are:
- Since this is a worldwide update, it has impacted all the versions of Google.
- The rollout of the update has not covered all aspects and will take weeks to roll out completely.
- The impact noted, is less than 1% of English queries and impacts other languages more or less.
- The purpose of this algorithm being rolled out is to demote the sites with bad link profiles and
help sites that were previously hit that cleaned up their link profiles.
Unlike the other algorithm updates posted by Google, the Penguin update has been launched globally. So the sights in any language or region are open to the potential impact of this algorithm. While the Panda update was more based on the content and language of the websites, Penguin focuses on the link profiles and does not look into the content for that matter. So when SEOs are trying to analyze if their site(s) have been impacted, it will be hard to justify whether Penguin or Panda has downsized the issue since it is a multi week roll out.
Although the officials of Google have not specified the latest iteration of their algorithm but one can deduce that the data and findings that one shares on the website have been heavily impacted, both positively and negatively. Taking a cue from that one can make some inferences on the adjustments one needs to make to their website that will make a change to their website as well. For market researchers, knowing the dates of these updates can help to explain the changes in rankings and organic website traffic, thus leading to the improvement of search engine optimization.
