5 Site Audit Tips to Recover from a Penguin Algorithmic Slap!

• We still have several clients suffering under Penguin who did not recover during the last data refresh. We've been reading your reports and have been trying to remove questionable links and improve on-page content but that hasn't done the trick. Can you provide some specific Penguin audit tips we can apply unilaterally across our still-affected client sites?

Answer: As of this publication we are still waiting and waiting on the pending Penguin update from Google. Although originally expected by the end of 2015, and then again in early 2016, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller confirmed in a July hangout that Penguin 4.0 (the next iteration) is still not ready to go....but it IS coming.

Considering how long it's been since a Penguin update or refresh, here's a quick summary of the recorded history for your review:

• Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting around 3.1% of queries).
• Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%).
• Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting around 0.3% of queries).
• Penguin 4 - AKA Penguin 2.0 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries).
• Penguin 5 - AKA Penguin 2.1 on October 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries).
• Penguin 6 - AKA Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014 (impacting less than 1% English queries).

Per the above, it's been almost two years since the last update. That's a long, long wait for a site that may have been impacted by a previous Penguin slap to see any kind of algorithmic relief. Hopefully, that wait is a...