Panguin Review: Feature Overview & User Guide
Google's Penguin and Panda algorithm updates have had lasting impacts on website owners and their SEO efforts. To put it into perspective, Google announced that Panda's initial rollout affected nearly 12% of all English search results while Penguin affected over 3%.
The collective impacts of these updates are often referred to as "Panguin," but simplifying the actual things you should be doing to perform better under these algorithms is no easy task. To help, Barracuda Digital has engineered a free tool that any website owner can use to make sure their site is in good standing under Panguin.
What Is The Panguin Tool?
Panguin is a free tool developed by Barracuda Digital to help website owners improve Google's perceived quality of their site. Since Panda and Penguin look at different variables, both with the goal of assessing your site's quality, this tool is very helpful in determining the areas where your site may fall short.
While Panda looks to assess your content, Penguin judges your site based on how you have promoted it. The Panguin tool helps you address all of these criteria at once, taking some of the legwork out of staying on top of Google's ever-changing SEO algorithms and preferences.
Overview of Panguin's Features
As a free tool, Panguin packs a long list of features that will help you make results-driven improvements on your website. Here's a brief summary of them all.
Organic Visibility
For starters, Panguin will show you where your website ranks in terms of organic visibility across search engines and regions. You can compare your report to competitors, generating such reports without any limits. You can also look back at historical data to spot trends over the last 5 years.
Paid Visibility
Panguin helps you determine the worth of your SEO investments by comparing your rankings before and after paid tactics. You'll also be able to create reports on your competitors and look back at 5 years of history here, too.
Powerful Encryption
Need to encrypt a page? The encryption tool allows you to protect and monitor your best-ranking pages and their SEO performance. With around-the-clock protection, Panguin will also generate alerts if it detects malware of a hacking attempt. Meanwhile, your insights will be inaccessible by third parties.
Regional Insights
Your site's performance is bound to vary across regions. That's why Panguin has a tool so that you can view the ranking of you and your competitors across various regions. You can also look for keyword use at an international scale and figure out where your offerings are desired the most.
Keywords Optimization
Acquire new visitors and expand your reach with Panguin's tools that help you optimize search keyword placement and monitor the impact they have on your rankings. Panguin lets you change your keywords at anytime based on the results you're seeing, helping you get more traffic.
Onsite Link Optimization
By far one of Panguin's best tools, this feature allows you to interlink pages on your website so that you can compare their rankings. Since readers will be more likely to stay on your site if they see a related page, this tool is very valuable.
Backlink Optimization
Double-check the structure of your backlinks with this handy tool that will help you measure their aptitude before you optimize and compare it to the results after the change.
Local Rankings
If you compete at a local scale, this feature will enable you to effortlessly review the impact updates have on your local search performance.
Mobile Searches
Track your site's performance in mobile search results with this tool that also gives you advice for helping improve it. Moreover, you can compare your mobile search performance with your past performance and the rankings of your competitors.
Overall Performance
Improve the performance of the content you publish with Panguin's optimization tools, then compare the performance before and after you made changes. You can also lean on expert advice to improve rankings.
Social Media Influence
Panguin has an additional helpful tool that will help you measure and manage your popularity across social platforms. Find public opinions about your business, read reviews, and compare your site to your competitors to seek improvement.
How Does Panguin Work?
If you're thinking about setting up or using Panguin for the first-time, you may be curious about how the tool actually works. To set it up, you'll need to link it to your Google Analytics account, but that makes some website owners weary. To put your mind at ease, rest assured that Panguin will never interact with the data found inside of your Google Analytics account.
Rather, Panguin uses OAuth 2.0, which is an industry standard protocol for extracting information from the data your Google Analytics account has made available. By mining the databases found within it, it's able to draw conclusions about the impacts algorithm updates have had to your website over the years. This is done by coinciding changes in your site's ranking and performance with Panguin's in-depth timeline of Google's various updates for the past decade.
By analyzing all of this information, Panguin is able to determine the changes you need to make to counteract the impacts of Google's updates and help your website rank better. Panguin also makes their long list of past updates available to its users, meaning that you can manually study the various algorithm updates that have occurred through time and try to make your own conclusions regarding the improvements your site could use.
The Pros and Cons of Panguin
As a free tool, there isn't much to complain about. In fact, given its sheer variety of features and the amount of historical data the developers have embedded into this tool regarding Google's past algorithm updates, you could probably justify spending a pretty penny on this solution.
Regardless, Panguin isn't an exhaustive tool. You'll certainly want to consider other tools to complement your SEO strategy. Still, Panguin itself is praised for being user-friendly and very intuitive. You can get it up-and-running in a matter of minutes and it comes with the basic features you need right out of the box.
Getting Started With Panguin
Panguin is an extremely powerful tool, and since it's completely free to use, there are countless reasons why you should set it up and get it running as soon as possible. Fortunately, Panguin's developers have made that a fairly simple process.
- Visit Panguin's page on Barracuda Digital's website.
- Click on the "Use for Free" button.
- Once redirected, enter the ID and password associated with your site's Google Analytics account.
- Once you're looking at your profile page, select the "Panguin Tool."
- Select any list from the link that you'd like to analyze. When you click on a link, you'll be taken to its analytics page.
- Examine your links one-by-one to see the impacts of various updates and get tips for improvements.
It truly is that simple. The only thing that might complicate your use of Panguin is if you don't already have Google Analytics set up for your website, in which case you may be lacking the data necessary to start analyzing your site and making improvements right out of the gate. If that's the case, you should install and setup Google Analytics as soon as possible on your website so that you can start taking advantage of Panguin and other powerful analytical tools to improve your SEO.
Scripted & Panguin
Panguin is a handy SEO tool to help you improve your site's rankings, but at the end of the day, your website's performance is majorly dependent upon the quality of content you publish, which is exactly what Panda was designed to judge. Meanwhile, the quality of your content will also impact your site's performance in other ways by affecting how long readers spend on your site, the amount of interaction your content receives, and various other factors that will directly impact your rankings and profitability.
For all of these reasons, investing in high quality content should be at the top of your priority list. Yet, many website owners get overwhelmed by the mere process of finding and hiring freelance writers. Here at Scripted, we focus on giving businesses like yours direct and streamlined access to a pool of pre-vetted, experienced content writers. Meanwhile, we supply both you and our writers with the tools necessary to ensure projects are completed on time and above your expectations.
When you subscribe to our platform, you'll gain instant access to our pool of talented writers. Through a rigorous review process, we accept less than 2% of all applicants, meaning that the selection process is already narrowed down to some of the industry's very best. Meanwhile, our pool of nearly 7,000 writers have experience stretching across every industry and content type, allowing you to find the perfect writer for each and every project.
While our Self Serve plans allow you to get hands-on with your content pipeline, allowing you to purchase unlimited content and even take advantage of our Premium features like a site analysis and quarterly review, our Cruise Control plan is ideal for businesses who want a done-for-them content solution.
Our Cruise Control plan puts your content in the hands of one of our professional account managers who will work to manage your site's SEO; strategize keywords and ideas; coordinate your content production; and work directly with our best writers to produce content that meets your needs.