Google Confirms The Real Time Penguin Algorithm Is Coming Soon

Google’s Gary Illyes said today at SMX East that next Penguin update will be in the “foreseeable” future, adding “I hope” by the end of the year, and it will be the real-time version of the algorithm.

Back in July, Gary Illyes told us that Penguin was months away, and we are almost there. Illyes was overly cautious and would not give us a timeline or date, but he did imply it will be happening soon.

Real-time Penguin

This version of the Penguin algorithm will be real-time, at least that is the goal, Gary said. That means that as soon as Google discovers that a link is removed or disavowed, the Penguin algorithm will process it in real time, and you would be able to recover from a Penguin penalty incredibly quickly. However, you could end up with a Penguin penalty just as quickly.

Google had already told us this back in June, but it is nice to know they are on track to make this happen soon.

Google: New Algorithm Changes “Aggressively Targeting Hacked Spam,” May Impact 5% Of Queries

Google says it’s rolling out a series of search algorithm changes that “aggressively” target the presence of hacked spam in its search results.

Ning Song, the engineer who wrote today’s blog post, says Google is turning up the dial in its algorithms to remove hacked sites from Google’s search results:

We are aggressively targeting hacked spam in order to protect users and webmasters.

The algorithmic changes will eventually impact roughly 5% of queries, depending on the language. As we roll out the new algorithms, users might notice that for certain queries, only the most relevant results are shown, reducing the number of results shown.

This is due to the large amount of hacked spam being removed, and should improve in the near future. We are continuing tuning our systems to weed out the bad content while retaining the organic, legitimate results.

Hacked sites are a long-running and common problem on the Web, which makes them a problem for Google, too. Earlier this year, the IT security company Sophos announcedthat it had notified Google of “hundreds of thousands” of high-ranking, cloaked PDF documents on hacked websites. In 2013, Google revealed that hacked sites were the second most common cause of manual actions. Around that same time, Googlelaunched a help center for hacked sites that’s still online today.

Google is encouraging webmasters, site owners and SEOs with questions or feedback to speak up in the Webmaster Help Forums.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that this algorithm typically impacts only the realm of “spammy queries” and not generic normal queries.