Google says Penguin 4.0 rollout now complete

The Google Penguin real time algorithm which started rolling out on September 23, 2016, has now rolled out fully to all of Google’s data centers.

Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed this on Twitter:

@jenstar yes, eh

— Gary Illyes (@methode) October 13, 2016

The recovery aspect of this new Penguin algorithm started a bit after September 23 — around September 28. Now that all data centers have the new code, those sites impacted by previous Google Penguin issues should have seen a recovery at some level if they took the necessary steps to clean up their links.

As we covered early, Penguin looks at the link source for the most part — so if you still have very spammy links pointing to your site, clean it up.

Those hit by any version of Penguin before — including Penguin 1.0 from April 24, 2012, through Penguin 3.0 from October 17, 2014 — should see an impact to their rankings if they made link cleanup efforts.

Again, Penguin 4.0, as some are referring to the real-time version of this algorithm, is fully rolled out.

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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 very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here.