Stupid Shit People Say Post Penguin

“There is more spam now than there was before”.

The reality is that Penguin most likely only impacts sites that were already ranking well. Google is not going to use their most computationally intensive algorithms to check every URL on the web. They are likely segmenting based on commercial value of the SERP, the visibility of the URL, and the search volume of the keyword in order to limit the number of pages they need to analyze. This means that those more spammy sites sitting at positions 15 or 16 might get skipped in this iteration. However, now that they are in the top 10, they will be picked up for analysis in the next update. Moreover, many will be scared into believing they are next on the list and will clean up. This takes time, but ultimately leaves a cleaner SERP in Google’s eyes.

On top of this, Google must give some sort of time frame to collect data. They are not running the Penguin algo on data collected just yesterday. Subsequently, new spammers may have made it into the top 15 AFTER the data was collected and BEFORE the algo update was made. These will appear to have “beaten” Penguin when, in reality, they just have not been analyzed yet.

We must assume that any data regarding sites that moved into the top 10 for the first time Post-Penguin will be noisy at best.

Also, I just launched the Open Penguin Data project. More to come on that.