Penguin 4.0 Is Here – and It's In Real Time

It's been two long years since Google's last Penguin update, Penguin 3.0 happened on October 17, 2014. Finally, Penguin 4.0 is here, and the sites slammed by Penguin 3.0 are finally penalty free. Even more exciting is the news that the waiting game played in anticipation of these updates is over for good, because Penguin 4.0 is the last release of this kind, because Penguin is now real-time.

What Does that Mean?

In the past, the sites affected by Penguin updates would be labeled as spammy, and slapped with penalties all at once. As webmasters made changes to address the penalty and improve their websites, a waiting game would follow because the list of Penguin sites needed to be refreshed.

Waiting for Penguin to refresh will now be a thing of the past, because Penguin 4.0 refreshes data in real time. This means that as Google recrawls and reindexes pages, the changes webmasters make will be visible much faster.

Anything Else You Should Know about Penguin 4?

Yep. Google says Penguin is now more granular, meaning the update is more page-specific rather than dishing out penalties sitewide. There is, however, still some ambiguity about what exactly that means:

Is This Update Live Right Now?

For the most part, yes, but the update is still rolling out. The real-time features may take a while to work out glitches and fully integrate, but within the next month you can expect to see a complete roll out.

Republished by permission. Original here.

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This article, "Penguin 4.0 Is Here – and It's In Real Time" was first published on Small Business Trends