Google’s official announcement: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/penguin-2-0-rolled-out-today/
Update 2.0 for Google’s Penguin algorithm. This update is both an algorithm update (the new algorithm works differently than Penguin 1.0) and a data refresh which addresses the current status of sites on the web.
According to Google, 2.3% of English (US) queries were affected to a degree that is noticeable by standard search engine users.
What is known about the effects of the update itself?
- While the first version of the update focused mainly on website home pages, the new one provides a deeper level of analysis of the inner pages of websites for more thorough spam filtering.
- Penguin 2.0 targets advertorials – paid content which purports to be objective (source – Google’s announcement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQmQeKU25zg)
- This update continues to focus on the issues that were addressed by the first algorithm, among those – link quality in the following context:
- Links from poor quality websites (e.g. ‘link farms’).
- Links from websites that are extremely irrelevant to the linking website’s topic.
- Paid links.
- An overabundance of links with exact match keywords.
- Google specifically stated that update 2.0 addresses the following issues:
- Massive link buying.
- Link acquisitions from poor quality indices.
- Spam comments on blogs.
If you’ve been affected by this update:
- This update should be treated similarly to other Penguin updates – make an effort to remove bad links, document the process and removal requests, and send a reconsideration request to Google.
- Go through your website’s pages and locate outbound linksto poor quality websites.
- Examine the website’s link profile to make sure it’s not overflowing with exact-match anchor text, and that the ratio between links containing keywords and links that don’t is reasonable.