Google’s Release of Penguin 4.0
Google has recently updated its page-ranking algorithm Penguin with version 4.0. While it has many noticeable improvements from the previous version, the critics are anticipating some drawbacks as well.
Google Penguin was first updated in April 2012 (after Google announced Google Panda, which is the primary version of Penguin) that “dramatically overhauled the way Google evaluated content quality, penalizing sites with ‘thin’ or spammy content, and rewarding sites that offered rich, detailed, valuable content.” The main purpose of the release was to classify countlessly many sites that appear on Google Search into the “good” ones and the “bad” ones, and give penalties to the “bad” sites. Such a technique had to be deployed because some sites used black-hat SEO (Search engine optimization) techniques to manipulate the search system, including paying for links and keyword stuffing.
Before discussing about the new release of Penguin, it is worthwhile to have some idea about PageRank. The basic principle behind PageRank is somewhat different to that of Hubs & Authorities model. The intuition behind Hubs & Authorities is that pages can play diverse roles, and some pages can have a powerful endorsement role even if they themselves are not greatly endorsed. In other words, some pages can be the hubs where all the links to important websites are located, while those hubs themselves don’t have much important answers to the queries. On the other hand, the idea of PageRank uses the intuition that the endorsement can be directly passed from one site to another, or, a site can be highly endorsed if it appears on other highly endorsed websites. In order to calculate the PageRank values of each site, we first assign all the sites with same initial PageRank, and we refine it with the “Principle of Repeated Improvement,” in which we have all the sites to pass their endorsements to their out-going links repeatedly (those sites with high PageRank at the current moment will have higher endorsements passed to other sites.)
The previous version of Penguin (Penguin 2.0 and Penguin 3.0) had some major issues with delaying updates; in particular, some websites that mistakenly had bad out-going links (that warranted a penalty) and later removed it, they had to wait for several months to see the updated effects. This shows that the previous Penguin wasn’t good at refining the PageRank values of the websites quickly and thus giving certain disadvantages to some groups, especially the start-up companies that need to increase their PageRank values as soon as possible. Since Penguin 4.0, this issue is expected to be resolved, as it will have gradual and constant updating of page ranks, thus giving immediate penalties and lifts to the websites. This continuous and non-stop updating will also influence the “volatility of search ranking”; because Penguin will update more frequently, we will notice the impact “far less than before”.
Nonetheless, Barry Schwartz, the writer of the article Google: Penguin Can Discount All Your Links, Good Or Bad, shows his apprehension toward the new update as it is “prepared for manipulation” too much. Once “Google Penguin sees mass manipulation, it can decide to discount all of the links, including all the bad ones and even all the good ones.” Therefore, some sites might lose all the links and PageRank instantly, which can be a disaster. It is important for Google to have objective and reasonable criteria for discounting all the links, and these types of concerns will shape how the next release of Penguin will handle PageRank of the links on its search engine.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-discount-all-links-22842.html