Penguin 4.0 Update
Have you noticed changes in traffic in September? Well this is the result of Google releasing its latest update, Penguin 4.0. What’s good about this update is that if your site had been fully penalized because of spammy links – which is the case of some of my clients – it is now able to rank as only the spammy links are targeted. This means that your site can now start ranking again, as long as you keep things “white hat”! Another great news is that Penguin 4.0 is a real-time update, which means that if you clean up your site of any wrongdoing – by Google’s standards – your rankings will improve immediately, rather than having to wait for the next major update.
Based on the portfolio of sites I’m working on, I can tell you that most sites saw their traffic increase, more particularly the ex-spammy sites which I had cleaned up. I’m also noticing that rankings for their most important keywords are up. A couple other sites lost a bit of traffic but the traffic lost seemed to come from broad keywords not fully relevant. Other sites remained the same, whether they are big or small.
The bottomline is that Penguin 4.0 rewards good SEO behavior and leaves room for improvement!