The last Google Penguin update was Penguin 2.1, the 5^th update on October 4, 2013. After a year and 13 days, they have launched another update of penguin 3.0 last Friday night, October 17^th. Google’s Pierre Far on a Google⁺ status confirmed that the roll out is still far from complete. The rolling out will continue till the end of next week.

Pierre said “It’s a slow worldwide rollout, so you may notice it setting down over the next few weeks.”

He also mentioned that the rollout began last Friday and affecting less than 1% of queries in US English. Pierre referred this as a “refresh”. He seems to mean it to be a little recovery from the last update. This update will affect only a few sites. No big changes will be noticed like the previous one.

Let’s see the Penguin update history and their impacts here:

1. Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting around 3.1% of queries)
2. Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
3. Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting around 0.3% of queries)
4. Penguin 4 (AKA Penguin 2.0) on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
5. Penguin 5 (AKA Penguin 2.1) on October 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)
6. Penguin 6 (AKA Penguin 3.0) on October 21, 2014 (impacting less than 1% English queries) (Collected from Wikipedia)

Explore people’s expression after the #penguin3 update in twitter.

What Will Happen After The New Penguin Update?

Google experts are mentioning it to be a major update since last year when Penguin 2.1 was rolled out. Penguins main interest remain in removing web spam and sites that are using –

1. Page rank passing Text Advertisement.
2. Low quality backlinks.
3. Too many links with optimized anchor text.
4. Black hat SEO techniques.
5. Link velocity.
6. Keyword stuffing.
7. Auto link building technique.
8. Spam comments etc.

What Should Be Done For Not Penalized in Penguin 3.0?

Prevention is better than cure, so you should do following practices to not penalize your Mobile Friendly website.

I.     Remove All Links From The Spam site: 
You should check how many spam site is linking to your site. May be a lot of spam sites are sending links to your site at times without your knowledge. A regular audit of your site will let you know about the low quality site, link building directories and off-topic sites. Remove the unnecessary site as soon as possible before getting a serious penalty.
We recommend you to read 51 Best Link Building Tools and Software in 2018. This article will help you to understand the importance of quality link building.

II.     Remove Links From Guest Blogging Site: 
This is common for such a webmaster to use a guest blogging network ever in past. If you used any guest blog before just delete the link if you have options or contact the site admin to delete the link. This will help you to get rid of penalizing.

III.     Optimize Anchor and Exact Match Anchor LinkShould Be Removed: 
I will suggest you to remove optimize anchor link. This may be adding value to you in the first place but more better if you provide Google a healthy link profile of your site. When the keywords found in the link are the exact keyword you are trying to generate more visibility for in the search engines called exact match anchor link. This type of link create attention of penguin. This should be removed.

IV.     Use No-Follow Guest Post Link:
If you have posted in a guest blog in the past and created links and if you have used rich anchor text, more chances of getting caught by penguin 3.0.  You must change the link attribute to no-follow.

What To Do If Penalized in Penguin 3.0?

If you already penalized in latest Google update and lost your rank or traffic, you should do the following thing to get back the rank or get more traffic.

I.     Use Google Webmaster Tools:
Have you started using Google webmaster tools? What are you waiting for? This is the main and key option for the SEO best practice of you site. It helps to remove sitemap errors and messages you for any other mistakes in the sites or updates, spamming and much more. Start optimizing your site with this magic tool.

II.    Create User Friendly Content:
Google always searching for the user friendly contents that are more relevant, clean, quality for the searcher. You should ensure that your landing page is clean but not cluttered with lot of links, ads or irrelevant stuff. Make sure the site navigation is user friendly. You need to make the site for a critical reader so you should concentrate in their needs.

III.   Create Profile in Social Media:
If you have not create any profile in social media you should create this immediately. Google will not give you credit unless you have any social activities. You should create business profile in Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Word press and Bing etc.  The more social you are, the more traffic you get.

IV.    Keyword Maintenance:
Over utilizing irrelevant keyword in a paragraph or blog post will draw attention of Google to your site as a spam. This is consider as a black hat SEO. So try to use relevant keyword with a minimum ratio.

So following the Google guideline carefully quality link building, creating proper social site activity will save your site from the penguin 3.0 penalty.

Written by Md. Arifur Rahman Tanu.