Google Penguin Update 3 Released

Google has launched “data refresh” of its Penguin spam-fighting algorithm. This was announced by Matt Cutts, Chief of Google spam team on Friday 5^th October via his twitter handle. He has informed that this latest update will affect searches across several languages.

This is the third update since the launch of Penguin in April 2012. This new update is called Penguin 3 just like the Panda updates. They are no longer calling it 1.1 or 1.2. You may recall that Penguin 1 was launched on April 24^th and affected 3.1% of English language searches. Penguin 2 was launched on May 26^th of this year and impacted less than 0.1% of English language searches. And the latest Penguin 3 launched last Friday will impact about 0.3% of English language searches. Although the languages affected are multiple Google has taken English as the baseline language.

According to Matt’s tweets English queries were affected at 0.3%, Italian queries at 0.3%, and Spanish and French queries at 0.4%. The intention of Google was to target webspam in general. The real impact was felt by those websites that had low-quality inbound links.

Google, however, has promised further jolts to such websites in the coming few months and webmasters of such website better be aware. The Penguin algorithm is here to stay!