For any digital marketers, ranking on Google’s first page in terms of paid search or organic source is a must for long-term growth and sustainability. Despite the competition brought up by Bing, Yahoo, and Facebook; Google still dominates as the leader in search engine which captures better users’ intent and better conversion rate. Every marketer consistently adjusts the website as well as adds on useful plug-ins or features that make their site become more “Google-friendly” to gain more visitors. As a result, they often watch out for Google’s announcement on updates regarding to its logarithm and rules.

In October 2016, Google announced on its Webmaster Central Blog that Penguin 4.0 is fully roll-out and now a part of the core logarithm. This update is known to present a fairer system to penalize black-hat SEO strategies with unnatural links. The penguin logarithm is known to “devalue spam by adjusting ranking based on spam signals, rather than affecting the ranking of the whole site.”What does this mean for SEO practitioners?

1.  Changes are real-time now. This implies that Google will monitor each website more closely to reward the most qualified websites with top rankings on its search engine. Therefore, companies would witness the positive and negative impact of Google’s actions much more noticeably.
2. It is never too late to leave black-hat tactics behind. This means that Google penalty is not forever and permanent. With the Penguin 4.0 Update, you can improve your website ranking much faster from Google’s demotion by removing the harmful links, updating the website content, etc. Overall, the approach is meant to be a fair system to encourage a right game plan for search engine optimization.
3. A shift from building brand not links. Initially, Google was not the first search engine to be created. However, it quickly differentiated itself from the rivals by structuring on level of reference rather than search frequency. Due to link referrals, Google results have proven over the years to bring better results for searchers. However, with the practice of unnatural link-building in the past few years, Google has continuously updated its logarithm to suppress the phenomenon. Penguin 4.0 update is meant to persuade marketers invest more in story-telling and generate relevant content.