The competitive nature of medical SEO makes it essential for physician practices, hospitals, nursing homes and medical equipment manufacturers to stay on top of the game through professional search engine optimization services. Google rules the search engine game and you really need to keep track of Penguin updates and be prepared for them. And the latest, most conceptually groundbreaking update is here – Penguin 4.0.
Finally, Google confirmed that Penguin 4.0 has rolled out. For starters it’s about real-time refreshing of data. But what are the other things that you need to look out for in this new algorithmic update?
Penguin 4.0 – Initial Impacts
Before we get into the specifics, here’s a bit of a background. There were algorithmic fluctuations noted for the past two years which Google brushed aside as “normal turbulence”. The search engine giant eventually confirmed on September 23, 2016 that it has begun rolling out its next Penguin algorithmic update, called Penguin 4.0, in all languages.
It must be remembered that the previous Penguin update, Penguin 3.0, was launched back in 2014. It reportedly affected only less than a single percent of searches in the US and UK. However, that meant 12 billion queries were affected back then. So it would be wise to be seriously prepared for Penguin 4.0.
The initial launch of Penguin 4.0 did not show much of an impact, reportedly. Then there were some recoveries noted. But thanks to the slow rollout and the continued devaluation of the affected links, the 4.0 penalty did not initially seem to be as extreme as the initial one.
The Major Tenets of Penguin 4.0
Basically, Penguin 4.0 comes with a mission, which is the age-old aim to penalize websites employing black-hat link techniques for manipulating search rankings.
- With 4.0, the Penguin data is refreshed in real time, which means if you have made appropriate changes to your website and if it is re-crawled and re-indexed, changes will be immediately made to the rankings.
- Secondly, Penguin attacks spam by altering the ranking of the page that has low quality links, and does not affect the ranking for the entire site. Penalties are issued for the specific page, which means webmasters would not encounter their entire site suddenly ranking low. The update is therefore based on page-level backlinks. So if a page within the site has high quality and relevant linking, that would rank higher on the SERPs even if the home page’s ranking is low.
With 4.0 processing real time signals, this could well be the last release of its kind. The official Google webmaster blog says that Penguin is now a real-time signal that is processed within Google’s search algorithm.
With insightful search engine optimization, you can ensure that you use the Penguin updates to your advantage for your medical SEO. And the real time Penguin 4.0 update is no different.
