Google 2016 Update – Was it Worth to Wait for Penguin 4.0?

A long awaited penguin 4.0 update is rolling out now!

The wait is now over, the long awaited (for almost 2 years) Penguin update is finally rolling out! Google recently (23rd of September) confirms that a Penguin 4.0 update is now running in real time within the core search algorithm.

It seems that September month has been a month of fluctuations for the SERPs. Here is a graph from MozCast:

As per these graphs, most of the local SEOs observed a major fluctuation around September 1st, when the temperature (as shown in the image above) was at its peak value, i.e. 108 degree. It was officially recognized by the name of “Possum Update” and MozCast observed an overall drop in local pack presence in their own data set on that day. MozCast also noticed a massive drop in SERPs (13-14 September) with image results on the first page in their own data set, which further caused a significant volatility, because the image results achieve an organic rank and so those SERPs acquired an additional organic result on the first page. MozCast noticed a temperature of 111 degrees Fahrenheit on that day.

As Google states it:

“With this change, Penguin’s data is refreshed in real time, so changes will be visible much faster, typically taking effect shortly after we recrawl and reindex a page.”

Moreover, it is also confirmed that Penguin is not only sitewide but has also become more page-specific.

As per Google – “Penguin is now more granular. Penguin now devalues spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting the ranking of the whole site.”

Moreover, this Penguin update is just rolling out and it is not fully live till now – according to Google. Thus, there is no confirmation whether a website would see any changes rapidly or not. There is a good news about this real-time penguin update that you don’t have to wait any longer (as compared to a wait of previous two years) for a major Penguin refresh.