Google updated it’s penguin algorithm. It’s is the part that fights spammy links to your site. This cute little chick is now a grown up bird and therefore part of the core algorithm. It now runs continuously so you can get penalised much quicker, but you can also also make a speedy return from those deep murky waters!
From their post:
- Penguin is now real-time. Historically, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed at the same time. Once a webmaster considerably improved their site and its presence on the internet, many of Google’s algorithms would take that into consideration very fast, but others, like Penguin, needed to be refreshed. With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page. It also means we’re not going to comment on future refreshes.
- Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.
That last bit is interesting too. The spam evaluation is much more page by page. So if you get benched it can be just one page and not per definition your entire site.
Keep an eye on your rankings
To me this seems good news. Spammy sites should be policed and if you – in a case of overenthusiastic use of SEO techniques – get into trouble, it is easier to fix. I think, it also means that you have to keep a closer look on rankings if think you’re susceptible to the penguins wrath. It could now be any page that takes a hit which makes it harder to notice. And if you have competitors that you loathe for not playing nice, it could be fun to see how they are doing.