Google Penguin doesn’t penalize for bad links – or does it?

http://searchengineland.com/google-penguin-doesnt-penalize-bad-links-259981

You should also keep in mind that even if you do recovery, you won’t bounce back to where you were pre-Penguin penalty. Remember, as we covered earlier today, Penguin 4 devalues link spam now, so those links that once gave you such great rankings now do not count. However, while those spammy links do not count, they also don’t give your site an extra demotion on top of not counting. They simply are devalued; they don’t count for good or for bad.

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But if Google only devalues the spam and doesn’t demote the spam, then why use the disavow file?

Illyes said in the Facebook discussion that “specifically there’s less need” to use the disavow file for Penguin. Gary also added “you can help us help you by using it.” Adding that “also, manual actions are still there, so if we see that someone is systematically trying to spam, the manual actions team might take a harsher action against the site.”

So in short, it seems Google Penguin no longer penalizes the site or specific pages but rather ignores/devalues the spammy links and thus the rankings are adjusted. Gary said this should make webmasters “happier,” adding “and that makes me happy.”

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