Dive Brief:

• Google has updated four-year-old Penguin, which penalizes sites involved in artificially boosting search rankings via poor-quality links, and made it a part of the search engine's core algorithm, the company said in a blog post. 
• The key changes, which are among the top requests from website developers, include making Penguin real-time, meaning any changes in rankings will be visible more quickly.
• Penguin is also more granular, adjusting rankings based on spam signals rather than affecting the ranking of the entire site.

Dive Insight:

As the leading search engine, one of Google’s goals is to ensure strong user experiences. Penguin, which was first introduced in 2012 and last updated in 2014, is the company’s way of weeding out site pages filled with links to unrelated content in an attempt to boost search rankings.

While paid search is Google’s biggest source of revenue, search engine optimization, which Penguin addresses, is important for brands and marketers. With content marketing gaining steam as more consumers spend time online researching and reading about topics of interest, a strong SEO strategy is one of the ways that marketers can drive success for these programs.

Over the past few years, Google has been testing and developing Penguin and now feels it is ready to be part of its core algorithm. In the past, the list of sites affected by Penguin was periodically refreshed. As a result, when sites were improved with an eye toward removing bad links, website developers had to wait until the next refresh before any changes were taken into account by Google’s web crawlers.