Designed to fight “black-hat webspam,” the Penguin algorithm was introduced by Google in 2012. Penguin penalized sites for violating Google’s quality guidelines and decreased their rankings in search results. It required manual updates, however, so sites with Penguin penalties had to wait for an algorithm refresh to see if their penalty was removed. More than a year after the last update, Google finally announced the 4.0 update in September, indicating that Penguin is now part of the “core algorithm.” (Translation: it’s not going away.) With this announcement, they publicly announced two major changes that should make it easier to recover from Penguin penalties.
Author Archives: Justine Murtha
Review: ‘My Brilliant Friend’ by Elena Ferrante
Sometimes we hurt the ones we love. Why do we do it? Elena Ferrante’s novel, My Brilliant Friend, suggests it is our own feelings of inadequacy. Through Lila and Lenù, two lifelong friends, Ferrante weaves her scenes of having and having not—and our inevitable human reaction.
Writing for the Distracted
The novelist is distracted; he writes for someone and that someone is sure to be distracted.1
Saul Bellow wrote this line nearly 60 years ago and I can’t stop reading it. Distraction. Every day I see a new article about how we are distracted by the Internet, by TV on demand, by our constantly beckoning smartphones and smart devices. I’m guilty of this and I hazard a guess that you are too.