Today, we no longer have to wait to see the effects of Google algorithm changes, as the long-awaited Penguin Live Update is now in live refresh. For those unfamiliar with Google's obsession with black and white furry animals — Panda and Penguin — we are talking about one of the automated ways that Google applies filtering to the search results.
Penguin Now Live Refresh
The Penguin algorithm is a set of rules that attempts to intelligently analyse who has been playing naughty and who has been playing the right Google game when it comes to links from other people's websites. At the very heart of how Google decides who is worthy of a top spot in their search results is the ranking factor of links — votes from other people's websites that determine who should be seen as the authority.
What Penguin is attempting to do is decide which links are real or earned, and which links have been paid for or bought. Google is desperately stamping out anything that openly flaunts their rules — and that means even websites that have not done anything wrong other than rank too well for a competitor who has no problem hiring someone to do a "negative SEO" attack.
Negative SEO Is Real & It Hurts Bad
If you have ever had this happen to your site, you will know how devastating this is for traffic and conversions, and how much of a nightmare follows in trying to get the penalty removed. Google has provided tools and means for achieving this end, but the process has been horribly slow due to the fact that the penalty is only removed when Google gets around to refreshing the Penguin algorithmic index.
The promise of the "Live Refresh" of Penguin is that a penalty from overzealous or unscrupulous backlinking will be instantly removed. This essentially makes negative SEO a thing of the past.
Overcome Negative SEO With Ease — Really?
Let's take a situation one might find their site in with a negative SEO attack. You log in to your site's Google Analytics to discover that yesterday's normal 200 visitors have turned into 2. At first you think it is just a bad day in search, but then this continues for several days and you realise something has changed.
On digging deeper you discover a message in the Google Search Console alerting you to the fact that your site has drawn a penalty for low-quality backlinks. You phone your SEO team and get them onto the case. They quickly identify the toxic sources, disavow them, and within a few days the penalty has vanished.
When I say the effect is instant, it is only by comparison to the old way of waiting months or even years for any effect to be seen. The important thing to remember is that Google needs to go and re-index those toxic links before they discount their association to your site, so it can take some time — maybe days — to see the penalty released.
So Who Has The Upper Hand Here?
The real reason I believe Google penalises, rather than simply ignoring bad links, is that they want to punish — not just deny any favours — those trying to manipulate the search results. There are many in the SEO industry who have argued for years with Google over their stance on low-quality links. There really need be no benefit or deficit from a low-quality link. Google could and should just ignore such links. Why hand out a penalty if they could simply set a threshold and ignore it?
Don't panic if your site is taken down from the rankings just because it no longer ranks well after a negative SEO attack. You need to keep your branded site for many reasons — not least because your existing customers will still come directly to your website and won't need to find you via Google. Even a negative SEO-damaged site should stay. Just make sure you build a new presence to ensure the old site still retains its regular visitors. When you choose the right team to help you with this, you will be glad you did.