Updated: September 6, 2017
In today’s episode of This Week in Google (episode # 199) Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam department, announced that the latest spam-fighting algorithm update to Google – nicknamed Penguin 2.0 – would be going live “within the next few hours”. What the new penguin update means for everyone is not yet completely clear, but we have a pretty good picture of what Google is looking for.
What is Penguin?
Google sometimes makes changes to it’s algorithm, or the software that makes the search happen, in order to fight what is known as “webspam”, or websites with no valuable content and whose sole purpose for existing is to feed “link juice” to other websites. The purpose of the Penguin series of updates is to locate and disable spammers through unnatural linking schemes, and each Penguin release has been to fine-tune the spam link detection capabilities of the search engine. Similarly, the Panda series of updates have been more about on-page issues, such as re-spun and duplicate content. So because we know Penguin is all about linking then we can make some educated guesses based on what we have seen happen in the past. For instance, when Cutts made today’s announcement he said it was estimated that approximately 2.3% of english searches would be affected. While Penguin 2 and 3 only affected less than .5% of searches, the initial Penguin release caused a change in ranking for around 3% of websites indexed, so we know this update will be close to the same magnitude. That means a lot of people who have paid good money to bad SEOs are, unfortunately, going to see a drop in their search engine rankings soon.
What’s Next?
SEO Advantage has followed every Google algorithm update over the last 14 years and made sure our customers stayed as far ahead of the changes as possible. We will continue to monitor our customers’ results and consult with other industry leaders to make sure you know about it as soon as we do. If you would like to be notified when this post is updated be sure you subscribe to our newsletter by filling out the short form in the right column.
If you have had any experience with the latest Penguin update we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to leave your comments below.