Gary Illyes from the Google Search Ranking Team today posted that Penguin has now been rolled into their core algorithm.
Penguin is the code name given to an update that was first announced in 2012 that targeted websites using link networks (including blog networks, or paid link networks), for the purpose of gaining rankings, thus violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Penguin is now realtime and part of the core algorithm. It took a while to launch it, but totally worth the wait imo https://t.co/ItQM8XxuQ5
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) September 23, 2016
The Google core algorithm looks at hundreds of factors to determine how it ranks a website, and Google are constantly adding extra checks to reward high quality sites and penalise (or filter) sites that are trying to game the system.
The difference with today’s announcement is that previously the Google search index needed to be updated, known as “refreshed” to impact on rankings for the factors analysed by Penguin. This is no longer the case, with this now being included as part of their main algorithm that is taken into account when a search query is performed.
The world of search technology moves extremely fast, and this change is yet another sign of Google upping the ante against web spam.