Penguin launched in 2012 and recently updated on 23rd September 2021 was is speculation for almost over nine months.
However, when the final Penguin 4.0 rolled out on 23rd September, many website rankings dropped while for some websites the update actually boosted their Google rankings. If you are not already familiar with Penguin, it is one of the two hundred signals that Google sends out to its algorithm. Penguin’s job is to go out and penalize sites that is spamming Google’s search engines.
So what do we exactly mean by spamming in this context? One way, It can be explained as creating backlinks to your website to boost your rankings and secure the top positions when you don’t really deserve to be there. You can not clutter the search engine results pages with unworthy websites by creating links from other websites. You cant deceive Google because it keeps getting smarter. Nonetheless, If you are getting links naturally you are safe, Or as long as you can make it look natural.
Comment 1 by Google “Penguin is now real-time”
Before: Previously the websites that got hit by penguin could not recover even after the webmasters would remove the spammy links. They had to wait for months before the website could be recovered. Penguin, needed to be refreshed periodically.
After: The data is in real time now, changes are now updated shortly after Google re crawls the page again and reindexes it.
Comment 2 by Google “Penguin is now more granular”
Penguin now looks at each page and does not spam the entire site.
BEFORE: Sitewide penalty
AFTER: the entire is not devalued if only one page gets a panalty.
Google recommends webmasters should focus on improving the quality of their websites to boost their rankings.