Penguin 2.0 was released a little over a month ago now and we can take a look at the website winners and losers and examine what you can do to keep your website rankings warm and toasty at the top and out of Penguin’s icy grasp.
History of Penguin Updates
Google’s web spam team developed the Penguin algorithm update as a web spam quality control feature in efforts to ensure that users’ search results do not have “spammy” results and that the user has a good quality search experience, finding the results they were looking for when they performed the query. Google’s efforts were in essence to remove sites that were not adhering to the published Webmaster Quality Guidelines. To date, there have now been 4 Penguin updates:
- Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
- Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
- Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
- Penguin 4 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
Penguin 2.0
In this latest update of the Penguin algorithm, Google has updated and improved the technology behind the Penguin algorithm, calling it Penguin 2.0 technology. Read below for a summary from Matt Cutts explaining exactly what to expect with this latest roll out of the Penguin update and a glimpse at the future, including tougher technology to detect black hat spammers and more help for legitimate webmasters.
Matt Cutts and the Google Web Spam Team
Matt Cutts, as you may know, is head of Google’s web spam team. His team focuses on reducing the amount of spam in Google. He discusses about this latest Penguin 2.0 algorithm update in this video. They want webmasters to work on developing compelling sites that visitors want to bookmark, share, and come back to the site, continuing to read the engaging content. As far as things that they will be working on changing with Penguin 2.0, which is dedicated to targeting black hat web spam. Penguin 2.0 is going to go a little deeper than Penguin 1.0 did as far as being more comprehensive and having more of an impact than previous Penguin algorithm updates. Advertorials should not pass page rank through their links. Advertorials are ok, but should be clearly marked and should not pass page rank and should follow quality guidelines. They want users to be able to identify advertorials right away and they should not be disguised as unpaid content. His team is looking at denying the value to link spammers, such as payday loan sites as well as some pornographic sites. New technology is coming in the future to help make spammers less effective with some link analysis software and detecting hacked sites. The web spam team is looking for more ways to communicate with webmasters and offer them even more help and guidance. They are also looking at identifying sites that are an authority in their specific area. Matt says that he is very excited about these latest improvements because by the end of the summer he expects to see a lot fewer spamming websites listed in the rankings.
Evaluate Inbound Links and Disavow Tool
Google acknowledges that not all sites affected by Penguin algorithm updates were knowingly or intentionally doing something wrong according to their guidelines. In fact, most big brand sites that have been link building for many years likely have some inbound links that are no longer considered good to have. One of the things that webmasters should be actively doing is continually evaluating the inbound link profiles. Use the disavow tool to let Google know that you no longer want or approve links from certain sites that are hurting your approval rating with Google because they are unethical links
