Google’s Penguin Update and Disavow Links: An Interview With Jim Boykin

At Pubcon 2016 in Las Vegas, SEJ Founder Loren Baker sat down with Jim Boykin of Internet Marketing Ninjas to talk about Google’s latest Penguin update and how it affects disavows.

With news about the latest Penguin update coming out, sites are eager to know how soon they can recover from penalties they received during previous updates. Aside from that, sites are also deciding on whether or not a disavow file would still be needed. Jim Boykin talks about this in the video below. The interview can also be listened to in podcast form here.

Here are some key takeaways from the video:

• Of the sites that ranked in the top 30 within the previous seven years, 89% no longer rank for anything today. Some of these sites are already gone but a majority were penalized.
• Before using a disavow file, it’s best to know the difference between a good link and a bad link. But determining whether a link is good or bad isn’t easy. There are some who measure links wrong. For example, some sites who have been penalized have a high Moz score, Ahrefs score or Majestic score so they may appear to be “good links.”
• There really hasn’t been great public tools available that look at everything and also consider what Google is looking at.
• With the old version of Penguin, an entire site can be hit and penalized. But with Google Penguin 4.0, there is no need to disavow as much. Google will determine what is a good link and a bad link. Anything they feel is bad won’t count. The Penguin update will look at things at a more granular level such as on the folder level, page level, keyword level and devalue link level.
• Links are such a big part of the Penguin algorithm that it would be better to just create great content instead of trying to build links.

Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.

For more information about Google Penguin, please see the following resources:

• Penguin Questions & Concerns Cleared Up: An Interview With Google’s Gary Illyes
• A Complete Guide to Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird
• What to Do When Things Go Wrong in SEO
• Avoid the Next Penguin Update: A Guide to Identifying and Removing Bad Links
• An SEO’s Ultimate Post-Penguin Checklist [INFOGRAPHIC]

Image Credits:

Featured Image: Screenshot by Rina Caballar. Taken November 2016.