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.