Google’s Penguin 2.0 Rolled Out: Algorithm Updated to Fight Spam

Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Quality Team announced on May 22, 2013 (i.e. yesterday) in his official blog that the fourth penguin algorithm update was complete to attain the version number 2.0. He denoted, “About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice”. Matt notified that this update is an update to the algorithm and not a data refresh.

Algorithm Update – Definition:Google's Latest Algorithm Update

Typically yields changes in the search results on the larger end of the spectrum. Algorithms can change at any time, but noticeable changes tend to be less frequent.

Data Refresh – Definition:

This occurs when data is refreshed within an existing algorithm. Changes are typically toward the less-impactful end of the spectrum, and are often so small that people don’t even notice.

Matt also redirects the readers and especially SEO’s to forecast the future updates by referring them a video that Google released lately on May 13, 2013. Here is the video for you:

Penguin 2.0 will target advertorials violating Google’s quality guidelines. Payed adverts which help in donating PageRank for a particular site are considered spam. Hence money transactions in return of passing on page rank will not be encouraged anymore. Matt expects this update to have a good impact on cleaning spammy search queries at least to some extent. Matt share about the future plans of Google to have sophisticated and much easier link analysis system.

Google plans to detect hacked sites in two different ways. The first method will get announced to us in form of a sole new update and they are at the verge of having discussions with webmasters trying to differentiate between a hack site and those sites which serve up malware. Matt warns website owners who are regular viewers and avid fans of black hat forums and other malicious content sites and asks them to detect and remove any bad links found in their sites using their webmaster tools account. He also had words on a same domain filling the entire page of the search results page for a single search query, that Google is trying to limit this fault.

Here are some notable comments received for Penguin Update 2.0:

“Well, what a great start to the day - my main website (5 years old) which has several hundred pages of unique, useful content has been slaughtered by Google. I had around 140 long-tail keywords which ranked on the first page which have all now dropped to page 2-4.”

“I don't understand what they are updating? I did an analysis over 30 websites. I found that whose page rank , domain authority, page authority and link profile are strong they are affected and the others who has nothing they get better position. I think Google should review their algorithm.”

“Great Update. Improved ranking much much higher! From 300+ to 100! and from 100 to 30! I am not worrying about update doing just what feels right to me and search engine rewards me with update... :)”