Pandas, Penguins, and Pirates! Oh My! - How Search Filters Work

Much has been made about the latest update to the Penguin algorithm that Google launched in Oct 2014. Mostly because it's the first update in over a year to this algorithm filter that catches spammy links and link farm sites.  

It does look like Google is upping it's game on poor content, bad link building practices and online piracy this fall with the overlapping updates of Panda, Penguin and Pirate algorithms.

This begs the question of how these updates to filtering algorithms work. From the article from Search Engine Land below, they explain how these updates work like filters to catch offending websites as the search bot crawls the web.

What Is The Pirate Update?

The Pirate Update — similar to other updates like Panda or Penguin — works like a filter. Google processes all the sites it knows about through the Pirate filter. If it catches any deemed to be in violation, those receive a downgrade.

Anyone caught by this filter is then stuck with a downgrade until the next time it is run, when, presumably if they’ve received fewer or no complaints, they might get back in Google’s good graces. We don’t really know how that works yet, though, because Google has never rerun the Pirate Update filter.

That also means that anyone who might be in violation of what Pirate was aimed to catch has escaped any penalty since it first launched. Since it has never been rerun until now, it has never caught any new violators

For more information on the Panda, Penguin and Pirate Updates, check out links about the slow roll-out updates here: http://searchengineland.com/18-days-later-google-penguin-3-0-continues-slowly-roll-worldwide-207339