Google releases Penguin 4 update targeting link spam

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is an ever evolving discipline and Google regularly updates its search alogrithm to provide the most relevant and useful search results. As a consequence we, along with other SEO specialists, are constantly researching and reviewing changes in the SEOlandscape to provide the best possible outcome for our clients.

Today Google confirmed that Penguin 4, with the new Penguin 2.0 algorithm, is now being rolled out.

In one of his recent video’s (see below), Matt Cutts from Google provided some insights to the likely direction that the Google updates would take this year.

The focus of this latest update is to better target spam back links, so any sites using indiscriminate back link campaigns will be quite likely to suffer a loss of rankings, and continues Google’s campaign of putting more and more focus on good quality and relevant website content.

While Matt Cutts indicated that this algorithm would only affect 2.3% of search queries, it will most likely lower the threshold at which spam links on sites impact on rankings. Apparently, this threshold when the first Penguin update was released was 80%, and by Penguin 3 it was less than 50%, so it’s likely that the threshold is now much lower with the all new version of Penguin.

That could mean that some sites might suffer some quite significant ranking changes, and anecdotally it seems that some sites are seeing huge fluctuations in their SERP positions.

If you are concerned or are seeing major changes in your search ranking, feel free to call me, or Bryan, on (02) 8904 7500 or email