Google: Penguin 3.0 Rollout Still Ongoing

Google has confirmed with us that the shifts and changes reported throughout the industry on Thanksgiving day were a result of the Penguin 3.0 refresh that first began rolling out 6-weeks ago.

Google told us in response to what we saw on Thanksgiving day, “the Penguin rollout is ongoing, and this is just the effect of that.”

The interesting part was that Google began the rollout of Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014, which was 45 days ago, or over six-weeks ago. For this to still be rolling out is unusual, I would think. In addition, many sites that reported changes on that Thanksgiving, only saw recoveries. Meaning, it looked like somewhat of a reversal of the Penguin 3.0 rollout that happened in October. But the results from what happened over Thanksgiving is still unclear.

The Penguin 3.0 rollout initially impacted about 1% of queries, with this Thanksgiving occurrence, I am not sure how much of that has changed.

In any event, those of you impacted by Penguin 3.0, do let us know if you saw positive or negative changes on or after Thanksgiving Day, November 27th.

Here are dates of all Penguin releases:

• Penguin 1.0 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
• Penguin 1.1 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
• Penguin 1.2 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
• Penguin 2.0 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
• Penguin 2.1 on Oct. 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)
• Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014 (impacting around 1% of queries)

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.