No, Google Says There’s Been No Penguin Update

This morning, I noticed a lot of buzz around a possible Google Penguin update. The SEO space was noticing huge changes in the search results from previously penalized sites, many that were impacted by the Google Penguin update.

The Google Penguin algorithm targets sites trying to manipulate their search results through link building efforts that they deem as unnatural. This is not the manual actions for unnatural links but rather an algorithm that detects these types of links automatically.

A Google spokesperson told us at Search Engine Land, there is no Penguin or other spam efforts going on now. So this update, at least according to Google, is not spam related. In fact, Google made it sound like there was no update at all.

There were many webmasters talking about changes in rankings over the past 24-48 hours, independent of the Panda 4.0 update from a week ago. Most of them said the update impacted their sites that had Penguin issues. But not all were convinced that it was indeed Penguin related. But either way, many SEOs and webmasters noticed ranking changes.

Here is one graph from a site that had an algorithm penalty that recovered in the past couple days:

Other webmasters shared their analytics with me, showing huge changes in traffic as well. While others just claimed Penguin or other recoveries.

When I responded to some SEOs about Google saying there was no Penguin or otherwise update, some SEOs said they don’t believe it. Here are some tweets from SEOs:

@rustybrick My analytics & conversions call B.S. :)

— Rae Hoffman (@sugarrae) May 28, 2014

@rustybrick @sugarrae Very hard to believe this is not a major update… Seeing crazy swings across accounts. Maybe not Penguin, but…

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 28, 2014

Again, Google has claimed there was no Penguin or spam related update done around this time frame.

To learn more about this, see our Google Penguin update category.