Google Penguin Update 3 Released, Impacts 0.3% Of English-Language Queries

Google’s Matt Cutts used Twitter this afternoon to announce that Google is launching the latest “data refresh” of its Penguin spam-fighting algorithm today and that it will affect searches across multiple languages.

Including the original Penguin algorithm launch in late April, this is the third update, so we’re calling it Penguin 3 and avoiding the previous 1.1, 1.2, etc. naming scheme, just as we’ve done with the Panda updates.

Penguin Releases So Far

Here’s the list so far, showing when each Penguin update came out, the percentage of English-languages queries it was said to impact (other languages are also impacted, but we’re using English as a consistent baseline):

• Penguin 1: April 24, 2012 (3.1%)
• Penguin 2: May 26, 2012 (less than 0.1%)
• Penguin 3: Oct. 5, 2012 (0.3%)

Some Details On Penguin 3

Cutts, chief of Google’s spam team, posted about the Penguin update in a series of tweets. The first said that a Penguin data refresh is on its way and that about 0.3 percent of English-language queries will be “noticeably affected.”

Weather report: Penguin data refresh coming today. 0.3% of English queries noticeably affected. Details: goo.gl/AF5kt — Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 5, 2012

He added more info via a few replies on Twitter, like these that mention the update will also impact a small percentage of queries in other languages such as Spanish, Italian and French.

@gfiorelli1 it will roll out for other languages at same time. Spanish impact is ~0.4%. Italian impact is ~0.3% of queries. Hope that helps. — Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 5, 2012

@glemarchand @gfiorelli1 0.4% of French queries affected to a degree that a regular user might notice. — Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 5, 2012

How Google Determines Percent Of Queries Impacted

For the first time that I’m aware of, we also learn a bit about what Google means when it cites how many queries are “noticeably affected.” In this conversation with UK SEO Rob Watts, Cutts suggests that “noticeable” means “above the fold,” at least to some degree.

@robwatts Basically. Swapping a #10 result for a different #10 result might not be noticeable. Swapping out in (say) top 5 ->more noticeable — Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) October 5, 2012

Google first launched the Penguin update in late April, and even though the company talked about targeting webspam in general, the real impact seems to have been on websites with what Google considers (too many) low-quality inbound links. Prior to today, there was one previous update in late May and Google has promised further “jolts” related to the Penguin algorithm.