Penguin is now a part of the Google algorithm

Today’s news is not really earth shattering.  Penguin has been around since 2012.  today, it was announced that Penguin would be built into the core algorithm.

Source: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Penguin is now part of our core algorithm

If anything, this is good.  It allows you to quickly get information on whether your tactics and practices are acceptable – instead of waiting on an update they may only occur twice a year.

However, this is the part that’s interesting:

Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting ranking of the whole site.

So, in other words, it makes “found spam” pointless to acquire.  This says to me that – instead of penalizing an entire site for spam that one might be unaware of, Google is simply devaluing the spam.  This is good for site owners.

For years, SEO’s have had to evaluate which links are spammy.  It was a super weird catch-22, prisoner’s dilemma:  “which links – if any – do I disavow?”  This would seem to eliminate that process, in my mind.  After all, Google will just devalue the links for you.

All in all, I would say that this is a good day for webmasters, business owners and SEO’s.  Optimizing for organic search got simplified a little.

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