Google Penguin definition

In 2011, Google first deployed the Panda filter, whose aim is to remove from its results sites whose content is considered to be of poor quality. A year later, still with the aim of enhancing the user experience, the search giant rolled out a second filter called Penguin. This time, it is sites that have artificially increased their visibility, notably through poor-quality external links, that are impacted.

What is Google Penguin?

Launched on April 24, 2012, the Google Penguin filter attacks sites using “fraudulent” SEO techniques in terms of netlinking or optimizations. These sanctioned techniques all aim to manipulate results in favor of the site using them.

Penalty factors

Some time ago, Google alerted website owners on its blog that Penguin was “a major change to its algorithm dedicated to fighting spam”. The update would downgrade sites that violated its SEO guidelines, and more specifically, those that, in the firm’s own words, “used so-called fraudulent techniques to manipulate the ranking of web pages within its search results”.Les techniques visées sont :

• Abusive repetition of the same link anchor
• Keyword abuse within a domain name
• Keyword stuffing” within external links
• Poor-quality external link profiles such as forums, blog spam, press release sites, etc.

Until September 2016, webmasters impacted by this filter had to wait for the next update to hope to regain Google’s favor after taking the necessary actions. Up to a year passed between two updates, far more than it took to bring certain structures to their knees, totally or partially deprived of visibility for having violated Google guidelines.

Complementarity with Google Panda

Google Panda and Google Penguin are two major but complementary updates to the American search engine.

Entièrement automatique, la première a pour objectif de renforcer l’expérience utilisateur en proposant des résultats débarrassés de ton contenu de mauvaise qualité. Sont principalement concernés les contenus dupliqués ou spinnés. La pénalité infligée entraîne l’éviction totale du site dans les serps.

Google Pingouin vise à pénaliser les sites utilisant des techniques de netlinking non conformes à celles préconisées par le géant du search, en particulier les liens de mauvaise qualité et les ancres suroptimisées. Mais cette fois, la pénalité peut impacter tout ou partie dudit site. Par ailleurs, elle peut être algorithmique ou manuelle. Dans ce dernier cas, elle fait suite à un contrôle d’un « Googler ».

How to get out of an SEO penalty?

In order to guarantee increasingly relevant search results, Google has introduced various “sanctions” to distinguish “good” sites from “bad” ones. In concrete terms, when a site is judged to be of poor quality, it is downgraded in the search results and loses a large proportion of its traffic from the engine.

If your site has experienced a sudden drop in traffic and lost numerous positions in the SERPs, a Google penalty is almost certainly the cause. Our seo agency is the first in France to specialize in penalty removal. A good penalty removal service starts with an analysis of your site to determine the cause of the drop in traffic.

Manual and automatic penalties

There are two main types of penalty:

• Algorithmic penalties, i.e. penalties automatically imposed by the search engine after a crawl (robot analysis of a site) of your site. These penalties are caused by two filters created by Google to combat spam and poor-quality content. The Google Panda filter analyzes the quality of a site’s content, while the Google Penguin filter analyzes the quality of its incoming links.
  Manual penalties, i.e. sanctions imposed manually by employees of Google’s quality team (the “Googlers”) after a thorough inspection of your site. When your site is subject to a manual Google penalty, you’ll be notified by a message in Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools). This informs you of the penalty and provides you with an example of the errors identified, so that you can correct the situation.

What is a request for reconsideration?

In the event of a manual penalty (and only in this case), you still have the option of submitting a request for Google to reconsider your site. In this request, you must concisely and precisely detail the actions taken to correct the bad practices associated with your site (keyword stuffing, low-quality content, hidden content or poor netlinking profile).

A Google specialist then examines your request. Your domain is scrutinized, along with all the corrective measures you’ve put in place. If these do indeed enable you to comply with all the SEO best practices imposed by the search giant, then your site’s manual penalty is lifted. If not, the penalty is maintained, and your visibility is severely reduced.

Our penalty release service

Despite the advice provided by Google to diagnose your site and resolve the various problems, the main difficulty lies in being able to produce a relevant and above all complete audit of your site. This will determine the list of corrective actions to be taken, and thus the possibility of lifting the Google penalty.

Renew your visibility with our SEO experts

Seo.fr is a search engine optimization agency whose team includes SEO penalty professionals. They work to ensure that penalties against your website are lifted as quickly as possible. There are four main phases in a penalty removal service:

• Site analysis: an in-depth analysis of the site is essential to determine the cause of the drop in traffic and to identify the penalty(s). In the case of manual penalties, site analysis is also important in order to identify all the elements that caused them.
• Strategy development: depending on the type of penalty, solutions differ. These range from generating quality content to cleaning up your external link profile (netlinking).
• Implementation of recommendations: once the penalty has been identified and the strategy decided, your project manager implements the appropriate solution according to the problems identified. For example, for a penalty linked to a poor link profile, a link analysis and disavowal service will be carried out.
• Follow-up and natural referencing: Once the penalty has been lifted (or is awaiting lifting in the case of automatic penalties), we strongly recommend that you carry out further optimization of your site to send positive signals back to Google. This will enable your site to regain its former positions more quickly and more accurately. Your project manager will work with you to determine the best course of action

When will your site be back in position?

The duration of a penalty varies widely. However, they rarely last less than a month, and often last for several weeks or even months:

• Manual penalties: once the identified problems have been corrected, it is necessary to send a request for reconsideration to the Google quality team directly via Search Console. The request is then analyzed within a week on average, and the penalty lifted… or not. It is very rare for a manual penalty to be lifted at the first attempt. Google employees are very demanding, and it is sometimes necessary to submit several successive requests for reconsideration before the penalty is lifted.
• algorithmic penalties: the problem is different, since automatic filters are responsible for the loss of visibility. You have to wait for the next crawl to hope that the penalty will be lifted once the appropriate corrective measures have been deployed. The delay may be longer than for manual penalties.

In the event of loss of traffic and positioning on essential keywords, ask one of SEO.fr’s Google penalty specialists for an audit as soon as possible.