We all knew it was coming, but did not know when, as usual.
Now its official: Google Penguin 3.0 was rolled out around 18th of October 2014.
Official comment from a Google Employee Pierre Far:
https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/NURBpsNpef4
In the online SEO community, many levels of impacts have been talked about. This update is again to get rid of any sites that have attempted spam link-building techniques. As it has been out for less than a month, we may not be seeing the full scale of the update yet.
It’s the sixth release of Penguin to date and the first in over a year, since October 2013. The exact percentage of queries affected is not known, but its said that it will be affecting about 1% of search queries.
The last Google update (Penguin 2.0), dramatically affected many sites and many webmasters took the clean up work very seriously. All of them are eagerly waiting to see if their hard work has paid off. As the update will be rolling out all over the world, in next few weeks, monitoring your sites is important. If you have taken corrective actions, and cleaned up your link profile and you start seeing improvements, you will know that all the hard work has paid off. But if you see traffic going down over next few days, then more work will need to be done.
If you have submitted the disavow files round 3 weeks before the official roll out, it is possible that they may not be considered. Site owners / webmasters need to carefully monitor their analytics / statistic tools over next few weeks.
Affected by an update or not, you should keep on top of the sites that are linking to your site and remove any that look spammy. Identify your links from Google Webmsater Tools, analyse them and then try removing them. Use Google’s Disavow Tool to make Google aware of the sites you want them to ignore links from. This work will not only help with current updates, but will also protect the site from future updates.
At teclan, we have helped many of our clients with algorithmic and manual penalties, so if you feel you need help, please get in touch with us.