Google Breaks its “No Holiday Updates” Promise- Rolls out Penguin 3.x Continuously

Despite Google’s unofficial promise (made after rolling out “Florida” update back in November 2003) to not mess up with the ranking algorithm during the holiday season; the world’s biggest search engine is on a continuous spree to push fresh algorithmic updates – Penguin 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 & 3.4 one after another. As reported by searchengineland on 10^th Dec, 2014, a Google Spokesperson said in an open statement that Penguin is shifting to more continuous updates with the idea to keep optimizing its algorithm as they go now. More details of all these 4 Penguin updates are shared below.

Penguin 3.1

Considering it as a part of Penguin 3.0, Google released Penguin 3.0 update on November 27, 2014. Though Google has already confirmed this update, no cases of penalty have been reported so far.

Penguin 3.2, Penguin 3.3 and Penguin 3.4

All these updates are not yet confirmed by Google. While Penguin 3.2 rolled out on December 2, 2014, Penguin 3.3 was released on December 5, 2014 and Penguin 3.4 on December 6, 2014.

Amongst all these four continuous updates, Google has confirmed only Penguin 3.1 so far. However Google’s decision to not even spare the Holiday season has left many people wondering & many online businesses worried as their sole earnings are at the mercy of Google. From “Thanksgiving” onward, Google is on a continuous spree to violate its “no updates during the holiday season” rule despite claiming to avoid updates during holidays on multiple occasions (in 2011 and 2013). Attached below are the screenshots of two such tweets made by Matt Cutts and Google.

Two months back when Google unveiled Penguin 3.0 update after a complete one year gap in order to slam websites violating Google webmaster guidelines, many clients from US & UK who’ve been hit by the penalty consulted SEO experts to recover their online presence. While Google confirmed that Penguin 3.0 affected nearly 1% of the search queries worldwide, we’re yet to see the impact of Penguin 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 on search engine rankings.

A Piece of Advice to all SEO Folks & Website Owners

Though it’s too late for you to avoid penalty from this Penguin update, we still recommend SEO folks to run a health check-up on their clients websites for “bad links” and avoid any black hat SEO techniques to lift search engine rankings unethically. For all the website owners especially those who don’t believe in updating their sites according to latest Google algorithmic updates, it’s time you opt for ethical SEO consulting services from a digital agency where professionals strictly follow Google webmaster guidelines and keep track of all the changes made by Google.

We hope that websites who’ve still retained massive penalty from previous Penguin updates soon clean up their spam problems and lift their rankings on Google’s search result pages. Stay tuned on our news section for getting information on more Google updates. if you have any questions regarding the Penguin hit.