When Google rolls out any of their animal updates, search engine marketers scurry to find out not only if they are impacted by the updates, but what they can do to adhere to them.

Penguin 4.0 (announced by Google on September 23rd), also known as Penguin Real Time is no different.

Something strange is happening though. People here within Wealthy Affiliate and people I have worked with over the last 11 years don't even flinch when Google rolls out a new change to their rankings.

Why?

Because they are once again after higher quality, more relevant, more engaging content....like every other update. Let's look at the two key aspects of this update and reverse engineer them to try to make more sense of them.

Google 4.0, The Breakdown

Penguin is now real-time. Prior to this, search rankings were largely impacted by Google Penguin updates all at once. Now these changes will take place in a real time (or close to) nature, giving Google much more relevant and in most cases timely results.

This is going to allow results to be much more current and it is my belief that Google is going to really start granting sites and particular posts even higher rankings if they are getting consistent dialogue with them (think SiteComments). This also includes many other metrics in their search rankings that will be influence and will fluctuate far more quickly.

Only a good thing in my eyes, dead content is going to eventually lose it's lustre and blackhat SEO techniques will be dealt with much more quickly in Google.

Penguin is now more granular. Instead of an entire site being punished because of one mishap, Google is going to be working far more on a per post basis than an overall site basis.

Just because a website has good authority and has produced great SEO ready content in the past, does not automatically indicate that they are going to produce great content in the future. That is why Google is going to become much more granular with their processes in terms of ranking specific content, and ultimately, devaluing particular posts.

I have my feeling some of the more "authoritative" websites will be adversely impacted by this that are producing low quality content and being rewarded for it, simply because of their SITE WIDE authority.

This is only a good thing for the "little guy/gal" in my opinion.

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There are 1,000's of metrics that go into Google rankings and nobody knows for sure the finite details of all of these, but if you step back and realize that Google is in the "more relevant and useful search" business and you build your content based on that idea, you will never be negatively impacted by Google updates.

In fact, since Google Penguin 4.0 was released, most folks here have been impacted in a very positive way by this. Higher rankings, more rankings, more traffic.

Onwards and upwards.