Google Penguin 3.0 – Officially released

Google’s penguin has once again created waves by putting an end to all the rumours and talk over the last few months. Google admitted that last Friday it updated its filter and it is supposedly targeting sites with spammy links even though we have seen sites that had lots of bad backlinks, spammy links or bad on-page SEO recover quite a bit.

Some of the recoveries have left us quite stumped so we are testing and diving in to find out the real reason they have jumped up ten pages in some cases. We had one client who we have been talking to and we sent a proposal out to last week recover from page 10 to page 1 as they had Google penalties earlier in the year and didn’t recover after removing them.

Close-up Of A Penguin Figure Sitting On A Keyboard
Close-up Of A Penguin Figure Sitting On A Keyboard

All clients who have been with us for 6 months or longer all gained a few spots at least and we saw quite a few SEO companies disappear from the map which allowed a few newcomers to be on page 1.

The forums are slowly starting to light up with talk about the changes, and the impact on their sites and their client sites. We saw many larger sites that were previously ranking very well, had bad links sent to them or had been punished recovered today and more are coming out of the woodwork. Some people are left scratching their heads as to why they dropped so many rankings but only time will tell for some.

This is the sixth release/update of Penguin with the last one being on October 2013. After much speculation, it was revealed that some companies who had been punished by the last penguin update and fixed the bad backlinks between then and about 3 to 4 weeks ago finally gained some of their rankings back or made a full recovery.

Google Application on the Phone Google Penguin 3.0
Google Application on the Phone Google Penguin 3.0

We believe the next few weeks will see a lot of ups and downs until the dust settles, a lot of websites will be planning big changes in their strategy and it will be an interesting time to see how long Google do it all again.

After this update many SEO company strategies will change, they will have to be more thorough, use more elbow grease as I like to call it and put a real effort into quality backlinking.

Today we saw a jump in inquiries and emails to us asking questions about what happened, why and what people can do about it. If you want to know more send us a message using our contact form and we will try to help out as much as we can to get you back on top!