When Google released the real-time Penguin algorithm update, which some SEOs code-named 4.0, back in 2016, Google told us this version devalues or ignores most spammy links. For the most part, Google’s Penguin algorithm no longer penalized for bad links because it would aim to neutralize the spammy links and just not count them, as opposed to penalizing for them.
John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, said on Friday in a video question and answer session that Penguin does try to ignore the spammy links. However, in the cases where Google cannot because there is a “very strong pattern” of spammy links pointing to the site, Penguin may penalize and distrust the site as a whole and not act in the granular way it was designed for.
John Mueller said this at the 37:06 mark in this video he posted on Friday on the Google Search Central YouTube channel.
What was said. The question John was asked was “Is the Penguin penalty still relevant at all or less relevant spammy toxic backlinks are more or less ignored by the ranking algorithms these days.”
John responded, “I’d say it’s a mix of both.” He explained, “For the most part when we can recognize that something is problematic and any kind of a spammy link and we will try to ignore it.” “If our systems recognize that they can’t isolate and ignore these links across a website, if we see a very strong pattern there, then it can happen that our algorithms say well we really have kind of lost trust with this website and at the moment based on the bigger picture on the web, we kind of need to be more on almost a conservative side when it comes to understanding this website’s content and ranking it in the search results and then you can see kind of a drop in the visibility there.”
John is saying, that in some cases, Google’s Penguin link algorithm can demote the whole site based on the links and not just ignore the specific spammy links. But it seems like it has to be very high levels of spammy links.
“But for the most part like the web is pretty messy and we recognize that we have to ignore a lot of the links out there. So for the most part I think that’s fine. Usually, you would only see this kind of a drop if it’s really a strong and a clear pattern that’s associated with the website,” John added.
John came back on Twitter to clarify that “this is the case for many spam & low-quality signals” in the Google algorithms. He explained, “we’ll work to ignore the irrelevant effects, but if it’s hard to find anything useful that’s remaining, our algorithms can end up being skeptical with the site overall.” “Our spam algorithms are pretty nuanced and they do look at a number of factors,” he added.
Disavow links. So do we need to disavow links now, even when Google said we really don’t need to? The answer is no, you don’t need to disavow links. You can John Mueller said, “I’d either ignore it or use the disavow file (for the worse domains).”